Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:17:17 -0700 From: Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.org> To: "Michael P. Soulier" <msoulier@digitaltorque.ca> Cc: Patrick =?iso-8859-1?Q?Lamaizi=E8re?= <patfbsd@davenulle.org>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: portupgrade failure Message-ID: <20081013181717.GA25545@icarus.home.lan> In-Reply-To: <fb6605670810131108h78caaf44nf12d1f711db93e39@mail.gmail.com> References: <20081003172624.GC6090@piglet.digitaltorque.ca> <20081004110255.4e05dbf1@baby-jane-lamaiziere-net.local> <fb6605670810131104h3f20797br52183de6f2a7d1f7@mail.gmail.com> <20081013180549.GA25442@icarus.home.lan> <fb6605670810131108h78caaf44nf12d1f711db93e39@mail.gmail.com>
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On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 02:08:54PM -0400, Michael P. Soulier wrote: > On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@freebsd.org> wrote: > > So don't use it? :-) There are alternatives like portmaster. > > I suppose I prefer a single, reliable, supported tool for the system. > portupgrade seems to be pushed the most in all of the documentation Yes, and I've always considered that a big disappointment, since portupgrade is written in Ruby (thus requiring knowledge of a separate language rather than C), and has its own dependency database (due to supposed limits of the standard /var/db/pkg database). When portupgrade breaks -- and believe it, it happens quite often, as a brief review of the freebsd-ports mailing list will show you -- it's a nightmare. I have to ask you: is this really worth it to you? You could use portmaster, which is a /bin/sh script that does not behave this way, and is maintained by a member of the FreeBSD developer community (Doug Barton). This would be a "single reliable tool" that does not rely on external dependencies. I strongly urge you to consider it. Do I use it? No, because I'm one of those "I do everything by hand" administrators who does things like rm -fr /usr/local ; pkg_delete -af and so on. But if I wanted a tool that managed things for me, I would very likely go with portmaster. Please note that I often get flamed for flaming portupgrade, and I would not be surprised if that occurred as a result of this mail either. I strongly advocate using whatever tool gets the job done (and if that's portupgrade, great!), but I see way too many portupgrade-related support posts on the freebsd-ports mailing list for me to ever consider it. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
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