Ports Tree, Updating
When updating your FreeBSD system, you'll first want to sync your sources to the live sources offered. If you hail from a Windows environment, you may think of keeping your sources updated as about the first half of the FreeBSD procedure which corresponds to Windows Update.
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Portsnap
Since 5.5-RELEASE systems, portsnap is used maintain the ports tree. Portsnap is the preferred way to update ports.
Subversion
An easy way to update through subversion is to install svnup; edit its configuration file; then run the command with the option set in /usr/local/etc/svnup.conf .
Select lines in svnup.conf file:
host=[choose server] # [ports] branch=ports/head target=/usr/ports
The command with arguments in this example is:
#svnup ports
svnup is a lightweight subversion program, and there are other subversion programs for heavier tasks.
Historical use of cvs to update ports
It seems there are no longer any cvs mirrors for updating FreeBSD ports, as FreeBSD no longer supports this method.
It's updated. Now what?
Well, go into /usr/ports and find stuff you want to install!
You may also want to install the very useful port management tool portupgrade, which also installs a program called portversion. You can use portversion to check your existing installed programs against what is available in the ports tree, and then use portupgrade to upgrade your existing, old, installed software to the new versions found in the ports tree. Together, portversion, and portupgrade allow you to make sure you have the latest version of ANY port in the ports tree, including packages installed with the base FreeBSD install that have been updated since your particular version was released.
Other helpful packages are psearch for looking up ports and their descriptions, and portmanager.
See also:
