Portupgrade used to be fun!!!

[Roland Smith]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 05:34:03PM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
> > I have used (and still do) both flavors of the above and I have to tell
> > y, updating the installed apps is as easy as apt-get update ot yum
> > update/upgrade.
> 
> . . . except when they break something.  It's a lot easier to fix broken
> software on FreeBSD than with a binary packaged based Linux distribution,
> in my (recent) experience.

I rarely see port breakage. If I do it's usually a case of PEBKAC, :-)

Having said that, switching between major versions of FreeBSD can be a
hassle with ports.

> > I used to love spending my Friday nights updating my FreeBSD ports -
> > then, as you are finding out - it's just getting tedious.
> 
> I've never found updating the software on a system "fun".  That's part of
> the reason I find I prefer FreeBSD: it doesn't break shit as often, and
> thus doesn't make it even *more* un-fun.

In my experience it is much easier to keep ports updated every other
week or so than to to it after a couple of months.

Only when switching between major versions of FreeBSD it is time for
drastic measures. I usually delete and reinstall all ports after making
such a switch. It is the best way to keep the amount of old cruft on the
system to a minimum.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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