Keeping Ports synchronised with Packages

[Richard Bradley]

Thanks to everyone who replied to my earlier question about using the ports 
and packages system better. 

To recap, I have always used cvsup and portupgrade to keep my programs up to 
date, but cvsup takes my ports tree to a newer version than any precompiled 
packages on ftp.*.freebsd.org, so `portupgrade -P` will ignore all packages 
as being out of date, and compile everything from scratch.

For the past couple of days, I have been trying `pkg_add -r` as suggested on 
this list. With a few notable exceptions (java, eclipse..) it seems to be 
working just fine, but usually gives warnings about the libraries being newer 
than expected (they must have been changed by portupgrade). I can only hope 
that the changes in the libraries are bug-fixes and do not affect the 
behaviour (I haven't noticed any instability, but this could well introduce 
subtle bugs).

My new arrangement is much better (I had been used to waiting a couple of 
hours for things to compile every time I used portupgrade), but I am left 
with niggling worries about using programs compiled against different 
versions of libraries than exist on my system.

My question is then this:

Is using `pkg_add -r` and falling back to `portinstall` the best way to use 
the ports/packages system? Is there no way to get the -P or -PP flag to have 
any effect on portinstall while keeping an up to date ports tree?

Thanks for all your help so far,


Rich