Portupgrade

Revision as of 17:30, 28 January 2005

portupgrade and you

portupgrade is a small collection of tools that goes hand in hand with cvsup. Portupgrade does what it says - upgrades your ports - but it actually means your installed ports, even packages that were installed as part of the base system. Portupgrade includes two important programs - portupgrade, and portversion. Between them and cvsup, you'll have the ability to keep all installed software on your system up to date, so long as it exists in the ports tree.

See also - cvsup - Update_the_ports_tree - portversion - Searching ports

Installing the Portupgrade suite

Installation is very simple:

oyabun# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade
oyabun# make install clean

Once it's done, you'll have to start a new session as root to use it without typing full pathnames. If you used su to become root you can exit and re-su, or if you logged in from the physical console as root, you can exit and re-login, or in either case you can simply use su to start a new shell without closing the old one. (Lazy!)

Using portupgrade and portversion

Now that that's done, you need to update your ports database.

oyabun# portsdb -Uu

This will likely take a while.

Now you can use portversion to see a list of installed programs that are out of date like so:

oyabun# portversion | grep \< 
expat                       <
ezm3                        <
fontconfig                  <
freetype2                   <
imake                       <
libnet-devel                <
libtool                     <
oyabun#

This is a possible example of the output you'd recieve from portversion. Issuing a portversion command without the | grep '<' would produce a list of ALL installed packages on your machine, with < for "out of date", = for "current", and > for "newer". How can you get "newer" than what's in the ports tree? This happens if you haven't issued a portsdb -Uu command to update your ports database. The database contains entries pointing to older versions, while the ports tree itself contains newer versions, leading to situations where portversion reports ">".

Now, to upgrade one of these packages, do this:

oyabun# portupgrade imake

Portupgrade will upgrade the port with the newer version available in the ports tree, and also take care of any dependencies the new version may have - if it needed ANOTHER installed port upgraded to a newer version, for example.

That's it. You'll have to repeat these steps (portversion, then portupgrade on one of the results) a few times to complete update your software, but all in all it's fairly simple and straightforward.

Note - you may sometimes be prompted to run pkgdb -F to fix inconsistencies with listed dependencies within programs when you issue portversion commands, after upgrading ports. Just do it (pkgdb -F, that is) and it will take care of the problem, allowing you to issue the portversion command.

portupgrade warning

Interrupting portupgrade may lead to various system catastrophes such as a broken package database and unability to reach internet to get what you need to fix it. The portupgrade command should never be interrupted. See Errors To Avoid.