portupgrade(1) | portmaster(8) -- which is more effective for large upgrade?

[Bob Willcox]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 01:23:32PM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 09:42:43AM -0700, Chris H wrote:
> > Greetings,
> >  I haven't upgraded my tree(s) for awhile. My last attempt to rebuild after an updating
> > src && ports, resulted in nearly installing the entire ports tree, which is why I've
> > waited so long. Try as I might, I've had great difficulty finding something that will
> > _only_ upgrade what I already have installed, _and_ respect the "options" used during the
> > original make && make install, or those options expressed in make.conf.
> > As portupgrade(1) && portmaster(8) appear to be the most used in this scenario,
> > I'm soliciting opinions on which of these works best, or if there is something else to
> > better manage this situation. Is there such a thing as a FreeBSD upgrade "easy button"?
> 
> Use portmaster, avoid portupgrade.  And no I will not expand on my
> reasoning -- I urge anyone even mentioning the word portupgrade to spend
> a few hours of their day reading the horror stories on the mailing lists
> over the past 10 years or so (including recently).  Choose wisely.

Well, just to offer a counter-opinion here, I use portupgrade and feel that it
has improved significantly over the past year or two and has become quite
usable. I run it every two to four weeks on about five systems and haven't had
any problems with it in a long time. However, YMMV.

I do get ports that won't build from time to time, but I haven't seen any
connection between their failures and portupgrade.


-- 
Bob Willcox    |       The future lies ahead.
bob at immure.com |
Austin, TX     |