On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:52:07 -0500 David Jackson wrote: > I have tried endlessly to no avail to upgrade binary the packages on > Freebsd to the latest version. I have tried: > > *portupgrade -PP -a > *portmaster -PP -a > *pkg_update > > All fail miserably and totally and have left the system in an > unuseable state.
For the benefit of new readers David's question tend to take the form: I'm doing this the hard way, I'm refusing to compromise, and yet it still isn't working. I updated from ports yesterday and it did "just work". If you dropped at least one of the -P flags, you should have less trouble. If you need binary packages for a production server, then build your own. > Why can't FreeBSD just make the package system "just work". Right > after installing FreeBSD I should be able to type a single command > such as update_packages and it should update all packages on the > system, Why would you need to update packages after a fresh install? It's better not to install any stale packages in the first place. > Why not? Why is something so simple so difficult and impossible? > Ubuntu can do it, why not FreeBSD? Ubuntu does pretty much nothing but build packages from third-party software that's either portable or Linux-centric. A lot of it is inherited from Debian, it has a comparatively huge user-base, and financial backing from a commercial company. > Why cant FreeBSD Just make the package upgrades work. You aren't telling us anything new here, *prebuilt* binary package are a second-class way of updating on FreeBSD. Packages pretty much have to be built for current and stable development branches for testing purposes. They are built against a constantly changing ports tree with variable lag which isn't ideal. Making it work like Ubuntu would need a lot more hardware and a lot more work from port maintainers to support branching the ports tree. At the moment there aren't really enough to maintain one tree. _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
