Package Management

[Simon Gray]

> Does FreeBSD have package management to view the packages installed
> and their names with versions, remove the packages installed, and
> track the packages installed to avoid conflicts and retain stability?


You can view what packages are installed by doing

ls /var/db/pkg | more

There is also a package called portupgrade
(cd /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade && make install clean)

which will upgrade your installed packages to the latest version of ports
running on your machine. You will however need to cvsup your ports
(http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html)  to
the latest version first - beware, don't make the mistake i've made in the
past, any databases (e.g. mysql) should be stopped manually before port
upgrading, because portupgrade seems to aggressively stop the db server
which can cause cached data to be lost.

Hope this helps,

Simon