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Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:50:19 -0400
From: Pierre-Luc Drouin <pldrouin@pldrouin.net>
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Subject: Re: Best Server OS for Someone That Does not Want to Touch a Shell
 on a Regular Basis?
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>> I noticed that in
>> the past few years, updating softwares through ports has been requiring
>> more user intervention, due to the way some dependencies are being
>> updated from one version to the next. Would using binary packages allow
>> to avoid more such user intervention?
> Yes. All dependencies would be incorporated automatically.
> Only ports without equivalent package that additionally have
> OPTIONS to set would invoke a configuration screen, and this
> screen would have to be dealt with only in the first run of
> the updating process.
>
> There are also options for portmaster that can be used to
> control program behaviour in case of problems (e. g. some
> package not found, conflicting ports, versioning problem,
> or port marked "broken").
>
So, what I was referring to in particulars was special updates like this:
20110517:
   AFFECTS: users of lang/perl*
   AUTHOR: skv@FreeBSD.org

   lang/perl5.14 is out. If you want to switch to it from, for example
   lang/perl5.12, that is:

   Portupgrade users:
     0) Fix pkgdb.db (for safety):
         pkgdb -Ff

     1) Reinstall new version of Perl (5.14):
         env DISABLE_CONFLICTS=1 portupgrade -o lang/perl5.14 -f 
perl-5.12.\*

     2) Reinstall everything that depends on Perl:
         portupgrade -fr perl

So you are saying that this type of special interventions is not 
necessary when using only binary packages, right?

Thanks!