“Despite all the praise the FreeBSD ports system gets, it has limitations. One of these limitations is actually related to one of FreeBSD’s other strengths — the upgrade system. The two interact in a very clumsy way.” Michael Lucas discusses how to go over the potential FreeBSD ports problems by unveiling the ‘portupgrades’ application.
Cleaning Up Your FreeBSD Ports
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Eugenia Loli
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That why there’s an open packages project http://www.openpackages.org
I don’t get it. Isn’t this similar to dpkg? I thought that the bsds had a great package manager. I was going to install soon. Am I wrong? Are they trying to remake dpkg on bsd, still? I hope not.
Nope they are trying to make the same package available across BSDland (*BSD). Today you have a mutt port for Free/Net/Open … Which makes 3 packages for the same software, means at least 3 mainatiners etc …. The idea is to reduce that with one package/maintainer for a piece of software, with openpackages, more apps can be managed in the BSD world without the need for more volunteers. More volunteers still coming could work in kernel land Instead ….
It is like dpkg in that you can download and install prebuilt packages, but it is unlike it, especially in the case of portupgrades. You can run `portupgrade -rR’ and it will rebuild every single installed port from source. Not only will you have the very latest version of all your installed software but you will have them all freshly built eliminating any dependancy issues.
When I tried out debian I found dpkg frustrating because you’re dealing with packages designed to run on a generic installation of the OS, not on one which you’ve been tweaking on. I don’t know, maybe I was doing something wrong, but I gave up on debian because I find the BSD ports tree more convenient for managing installed software.
You can :
1) use pkg_version
” pkg_version -c > upgrade.sh
Then edit this file (it can have some weird things, but very easy to correct).
And last :
# sh ugrade.sh
2) use pkg_update (I never did it, so I can’t say much about it. See man)
3) use portupgrade
You have to install that port first. There is a good article about it on BSD Devcenter now)
“You have to install that port first. There is a good article about it on BSD Devcenter now”.
I forgot that it was precisely the article we were commenting.