How to update like Debian

[Mark Saad]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Freddie Cash <fjwcash at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Denny Schierz <linuxmail at 4lin.net> wrote:
>
>> I think, I do not understand, how to update (security/bugfixes) my 8.2
>> machines :-) I searched a lot and tried, what I have found in the docs, but
>> I had trouble ...
>>
>> What I have done (one thing was working, but didn't know, if it is
>> correct):
>>
>>
> Updating FreeBSD is done is two separate processes, which can be done
> independently of one another.
>
> There is a clear separation between "the base FreeBSD OS" and "third-party
> apps installed on top".  This is something that is missing in the land of
> the penguin, and tends to trip people up as they switch between FreeBSD and
> Linux (in either direction).
>
> To do a binary upgrade of the base OS, you use freebsd-update:
>  # freebsd-update fetch
>  # freebsd-update update
>
> See the freebsd-update man page for more details and options.
>
> That updates only the base OS (stuff under / and /usr; it does not touch
> anything under /usr/local).
>
>
> There are several different ways to update your installed third-party
> software (stuff installed via either pkg_add or the ports tree), depending
> on whether or not you want to compile software.  Since you want have a
> Debian-like experience, then you want to install via binary packages as much
> as possible.
>
> See the man page for pkg_add for information on doing the initial install of
> software, including remotely fetching software (this would be similar to
> "apt-get install" without any upgrade support).
>
Two other options to keep ports up to date are portupgrade in
ports-mgmt/portupgrade
and portmaster in ports-mgmt/portmaster .
To see some real world example of using it check the man page for each and
take a look at /usr/ports/UPDATING you will see some example of how to
upgrade major port changes

Check out the entry from 20110517 about upgrading to perl 5.14 and
removing the older version and fixing all the depends.

In the debian world there is no exact comparison for this , major
changes like this could/would be done by the maintainers and pushed
out as debs with some warnings.

portmaster and portupgrade both do the same relative tasks, the best
advice would be to try both and see which you like. Also stick to
using one port management tool . If you want to manually upgrade try
to do that, if you want a wrapper like portupgrade use portinstall /
portupgrade . Mixing and matching ports management tools for me imho a
bad idea for beginners.

> A nice tool for handling upgrades of binary packages, using only binary
> packages, is pkg_upgrade.  This is part of the bsdadminscripts package, so
> you'll need to install that first.  Using pkg_add and pkg_upgrade, you do
> not even need to install the ports tree (and can even "rm -rf
> /usr/ports/*").
>
> That's about as close to a Debian-like experience as you'll get.
> --
> Freddie Cash
> fjwcash at gmail.com
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-- 
mark saad | nonesuch at longcount.org