Re: Newbie questions about updating
On 9/7/07, Lars Eighner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 7 Sep 2007, cothrige wrote: assumption that one must run two cvsup operations with two separate supfiles to update both the core OS and the ports. Am I understanding this correctly? No. It is not must. You can update your source and your ports tree with one supfile. You can add the line [snip] Many people do it it two operations because they really are two different things. Okay, that seems to confirm my basic understanding then. I must readily admit that the overall application is a bit above me at this point (it is certainly more complicated than the aptitude update and aptitude upgrade that I am used to.). At least though I appear to be on the right track about how the two are different entities in some manner. There is no necessary, hard and fast, connection between the two. If your ports tree gets very, very stale, it will largely cease to work because many (some) of the source files will disappear or their dependencies will disappear or change. Okay, this makes sense to me. General, upgrading the OS is a good idea about six months after the second release of a major version number (i.e. when 7.2 or 7.3 is a release and is about six-months old). So, you would say that there is no pressing need to update the OS yet? If I don't want to run stable and use tag=RELENG_6_2 will I be required to keep the ports as they have installed from the disc? No. In fact you shouldn't. (But as mentioned above, never use any tag with ports except ..) Of course there are two different things here that you might be confusing. The ports tree, which is a skeleton for building applications from scratch, and packages, which are pre-built binaries for applications. Yes, I think I am probably confusing them at least to a degree. Probably that is because it just seems logical that the packages would match what is in the ports tree and it is hard for me to imagine it may not be the case. If my ports tree has a particular version of an app in it, say mplayer-1.0.7 wouldn't the package available be the same? I also wonder about this because portupgrade, which is obviously for ports, does have the option for using packages. It does make me wonder, how does pkg_add or portupgrade know which versions of which packages to retrieve, as opposed to using the port to know which version of the port to install? Does that make sense? I feel like I am being very awkward in my wording, and I apologize for not being more clear in it. Here's the best way to install 6.2 starting with the CD release (assuming you have internet connectivity which I guess you do since you mailed to this list). 1. Install 6.2 including source, but do not install Xorg. [snip] 6. Install Xorg (and other applications you may want) from the ports tree. Very good to know. Unfortunately, I did not use this way to get started, but next time I will certainly follow your suggestions as even now I can see how they would help. Installing X from the disc was not the best choice, but being used to Linux installers it seemed logical at the time. As did installing the ports tree. [snip] The main object is to keep the ports in synch with other ports. There are just a few ports that do things (like build loadable kernel modules) which just won't work if they are too out of synch with the operating system, but these are few and far between. I think I understand. So, I can update the ports x number of times per a given period of time, but I don't have to update the OS as often. They are not so intimately connected that I have to keep them in sync somehow with one another, and therefore updating them at different rates will not cause breakage, am I right? When I first finished setting things up I could install packages using pkg_add -r, but noticed that after updating the ports I could no longer do that More than likely the packages were broken. Often the available packages are way out of date or do not exist (because of licensing restrictions or no one got around to building them). Packages depend to much greater extent on the OS release. Very interesting. But, could that really explain a 100% failure rate? In my previous experience with FreeBSD I became convinced that I had broken things badly since after updating I was unable to use even one package. I mean, no big deal in itself, and if the system had no package options I would have no real complaint. But, it just seemed broken as it was, and so I was convinced that I had done something wrong. Portsnap is a different system from cvsup. They should get approximately the same tree (not exactly the same because the ports tree changes so rapidly). Portsnap is usually run automatically (as a cron job) every few days, or oftener if you are really complusive. It is said to save bandwidth if used this way, so if you are administering a large system, it probably pays off
Re: Newbie questions about updating
On 9/7/07, Jerry McAllister [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 10:53:09AM -0500, cothrige wrote: Sorry. What I really had in mind was the ports tree itself, which I had an option during install to add. BTW, I answered yes to this and so had that which was on the 6.2 install disc. Based on the other responses, it is looking like perhaps that is not the best method, and maybe I should have skipped that and then added the ports after the install using cvsup or such. This is certainly a good thing to know for the future, though as of right now I am dealing with the disc install method. No. You were right to choose yes. That just installs the ports tree skeleton. It does not install any actual ports. Then when you do a csup tag=. for the ports tree, then it updates that tree. But you would still have to update the ports from the tree that you have chosen to install. What exactly is the best method for the new install when it comes to ports? I should say yes to installing the ports tree, but then how should I go forward at that point? For instance, should I immediately run csup when booting into the new system before actually installing anything from ports? Will that speed things up in the end, or make for greater stability? The ports tree from one version of the OS to the next is not particularly different. It is just instructions on how to get the source and build the port (including dependant ports). It gets a little out of date now and then as the list of files that need to be downloaded or build procedured change, so it need a csup update now and then. But what that csup does is update the skeleton, not the actual ports. That is a subsequent step. Cool, that makes sense. I suppose right now it is a matter of figuring out just getting used to how to handle the system and know that I am carrying out the correct steps, or at least the most reliable steps, in the most beneficial order. Thanks, Patrick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Newbie questions about updating
On 9/7/07, Erich Dollansky [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Howdy, and thanks for the help. [snip] I have downloaded the FreeBSD 6.2 install discs and have finished the Just stick with 6.2 for the moment. I had thought this might be the best method, and so figured I would for some time anyway. I am also running FreeBSD on an ancient laptop just for a learning experience, and because so far FreeBSD has been the only system which seems able to run on it :-). For this reason I am tending to keep things fairly small and am trying not to make huge updates unless I have to. level? If I don't want to run stable and use tag=RELENG_6_2 will I be required to keep the ports as they have installed from the disc? Is there any connection between how current the ports are and how current the OS is? Wait, you do not install ports from the disc, you install packages from the disc. This is a small difference. Ports are source based, packages are binaries. Sorry. What I really had in mind was the ports tree itself, which I had an option during install to add. BTW, I answered yes to this and so had that which was on the 6.2 install disc. Based on the other responses, it is looking like perhaps that is not the best method, and maybe I should have skipped that and then added the ports after the install using cvsup or such. This is certainly a good thing to know for the future, though as of right now I am dealing with the disc install method. One of the things which caused me to wonder about this was that some time back I tried FreeBSD out for a while and ran into some oddities concerning the ports system. When I first finished setting things up I could install packages using pkg_add -r, but noticed that after updating the ports I could no longer do that. That struck me as odd, Updating the ports tree means actually switching to ports but you still can use packages via portupgrade. What has happened to me before is that after the fresh install if I typed pkg_add -r foo it would say something like fetching http://...freebsd-6.[x]/foo.1.0.0.tbz...; and then install it. But, after I would update the ports if I typed the same command, pkg_add -r foo, it would fail saying something like fetching http://...freebsd-6.[x]/foo.1.0.1.tbz...; and then say something about no such package. At the time it was happening I had looked at the address being used and of course in the one for freebsd-6.whatever (or whichever directory my OS was trying to fetch from) there was only the foo.1.0.0 file and not the new one. The ports upgrade seemed to make my system stop searching for foo.1.0.0 and begin looking for 1.0.1, but it did not change where the pkg_add program looked and so it would always fail. Most of the time this would be no big deal, and I don't run KDE, Gnome or such, but it is more time consuming (especially on some of my old stuff like this laptop) and more importantly it just always made me think it was broken. It really just doesn't seem like the intended behaviour with it looking for nonexistent packages. When things seem to misbehave like that I always have a sneaking suspicion that not too long in the future it will come crashing down as I have some fundamental setting flawed and with every install or change I am compounding the problem. Never forget, the ports tree is a live object. It can happen that you upgrade now and find a ruined system, then upgrade a minute later and the system is fine again. Yes, I can see how that would be the case, and in a broken port I think that likely this may be so. Also, if the package system does not operate after updating ports then I could also rest easy that things are operating as they should. However, my reading of the handbook, and other documents, implies that one should in theory be able to use packages even with an updated ports tree, as portupgrade -P would seem to suggest. But, in the past that would always fail as the package does not exist in the place being searched and then a port would be built. Again, building is usually fine, and I may even prefer it most of the time, but since portupgrade seems to exist to work with updated ports trees, and it has options to use packages, my experiences with these in the past have given me the distinct impression that I have been doing something wrong. One last newb question is concerning cvsup itself. In reference to ports is there a difference, in the end, between this and portsnap? There should be no difference at the final end. Good to know. Erich Thanks Erich. Patrick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Newbie questions about updating
I know this is going to be a very dumb question, but I just can't seem to get my mind around exactly what is involved and what I should do regarding this issue. I understand from reading the handbook that the ports system is completely separate from the OS itself, and that these can be upgraded or updated separately. From what I can see this seems to most often involve CVSup, and I have been operating under the assumption that one must run two cvsup operations with two separate supfiles to update both the core OS and the ports. Am I understanding this correctly? Assuming I am, my main confusion concerns just how these two systems actually interact and relate to each other, and whether there are any requirements connecting updating each of them together? For instance, I have downloaded the FreeBSD 6.2 install discs and have finished the basic installation and setup. Now at some point if I wish to update the ports does that mean I have to update the OS to a particular level? If I don't want to run stable and use tag=RELENG_6_2 will I be required to keep the ports as they have installed from the disc? Is there any connection between how current the ports are and how current the OS is? One of the things which caused me to wonder about this was that some time back I tried FreeBSD out for a while and ran into some oddities concerning the ports system. When I first finished setting things up I could install packages using pkg_add -r, but noticed that after updating the ports I could no longer do that. That struck me as odd, and because of it I always had a suspicion that I had broken the system with my out of whack updates (I did not move up to stable at that time) but I just never could really find out if that were so. One last newb question is concerning cvsup itself. In reference to ports is there a difference, in the end, between this and portsnap? Do they result in the same ports? I am sure this is answered somewhere, but the handbook and other sites seem to take a somewhat ground-eye view of how to use them but don't dwell much on the mysteries behind what they do and how they may differ. Many thanks for any clarification that can be offered to me on these things. Patrick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Getting started with FreeBSD
* Garrett Cooper ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Btw (Off-topic, but true): Nothing in Gentoo (or FreeBSD or any other variant of Unix for that matter) says you have to install KDE ;). You can install the same metapackage in any Unix OS, if you love the bloat--uh, I mean functionality--or use another DE/WM to navigate around your desktop. Oh, absolutely. I don't actually use KDE or anything. Can't stand it personally. However, I inevitably want to use something which requires something which requires on of these giant bloated monsters like KDE or Gnome. And then I am faced with the question of compiling it. I can still remember the seventeen hour build of kdelibs on Gentoo, and I don't want to do it again. Though, I admit you very quickly start to make better decisions about what software you really need in that situation. I find it interesting that a former Slackware user would be complaining about compiling stuff, but you probably used slapt-get to update your packages. Well, I am probably coming off whiny. However, I am pretty typical of the Slackware crowd in that much of what I am running I compiled from source. But the base system is still binaries and that does speed things up. Pat doesn't patch everything endlessly and so it works well and as intended, so there is really no trade off. I am all for compiling, but why do it when nothing is any different? Firefox works great from binaries, and so I have never bothered to try compiling it. Same for openoffice and java. Even in Gentoo I installed the binaries of those. What I guess is troubling me here though is just figuring stuff out. I have been having some trouble seeing the forest through the trees. The handbook is quite honestly awesome, but only in the details. For the big picture it is fairly indistinct. So, getting my trifling brain around what exactly is going on in the thing has been nagging at me. How do I set it up? Where do I go next? Those kinds of things. I installed from binaries, and there are packages on the servers, and the tools have options for installing packages. I naturally thought there would be package updates and I was messing things up, or misunderstanding what tools to use, in order to get to those packages. However, after reading you post, I am thinking that the packages are only available for the snapshots labelled RELEASE. Am I right? All updates and changes made in between one release and the next are via sources. Would that be accurate? If so, I can say that is also fairly simple, simply non-intuitive. In some ways like having a separate ports system from the base. Simple, even sensible, but in some ways non-intuitive. Certainly for those not used to that approach. It is too bad that the documentation doesn't have a clearer introduction which approaches these simple though not necessarily natural approaches and make them clearer to newbies like myself. It would save a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to open the front door with a can opener. ;-) Let me know how ridiculously off-base I am in my current understanding. That is really what I am trying to do, find out what I should do to maintain things as move along the learning curve. Thanks for the help. Patrick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Getting started with FreeBSD
* Tore Lund ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I wondered about the same thing some time ago. I was told by one of the gurus to try packages-6-stable, which would most likely work with 6.1-RELEASE. So I tried to fetch the latest Firefox in this way: pkg_add [no line break] ftp://ftp.mirror.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/www/firefox-1.5.0.7,1.tbz Doesn't this seem a tad clunky and unfinished? I am still having a bit of trouble figuring out what I am overlooking. Why would a fully binary installed OS offer no binary support for updates at all? Why have a nice secure RELEASE edition when once installed it will naturally develop security holes that are very hard to find and fix? Things are just so foggy at this point and I must assume that I am just not seeing the answer to this. Seems to work fine. However, I tried to do the same thing with Thunderbird (mail/thunderbird-1.5.0.7.tbz), and then I got many warnings about libraries not being up to date. Could I have done it differently to get dependencies updated as well? Just a few extra words in section 4.4.1 the handbook could probably have cleared this up. One of the things I don't get is the stable vs. release concept. There is basically nothing said to address this. I can imagine that the packages in packages-6.1-release are fixed and static, though it surprises me that no security fixes are placed there, but what about packages-6-stable? These seem quite new, comparitively, and so I would assume that they are not static as release are. And if they are in fact tracked and improved, how can they be accessed via the tools? Your experience seems to show that using them in a release system is not ideal, and so must be unintended. It really is about as clear as mud to me. And as fine as the handbook is I cannot really use the info given there without a better understanding of the basic system concepts such as this first. Patrick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Getting started with FreeBSD
I am a complete newb to BSD trying to get started learning a bit about how to make my way in it. I have been using Slackware over the last four years or so, and this has made me a bit used to one way of doing things and now the FreeBSD way is kind of rattling me. For some background, I installed from the FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE discs, and this is also what I get from uname -r. What I don't understand is the relationship between ports, packages and security. For instance, I am currently using firefox 1.5.0.1, which I keep seeing online is not terribly secure. However, I am confused about what FreeBSD makes available to update this and other similar packages. I installed this, and most of the rest of the system, from the discs via packages, and hope to keep packages as my main method. I have had some experience in the past with twenty hour compiles of kdelibs on Gentoo and really don't want that again but I cannot find any info anywhere on how to approach updating for security via packages. I installed once previously as a test, and in that system followed the only online information I could find which seemed relevant, and that was regarding cvsup. I backed up the ports directory and setup a supfile according the handbook and a couple of examples, and went ahead and ran it. From there I started checking how things would go if I ran portupgrade on a couple of apps. I chose the infamous kdelibs as my sample. When I ran portupgrade -P, just to check things out and see what I would get, it failed to find a package and started grabbing the source. No, couldn't do that, so I killed it. I then tried again with portsnap and got the same result. When I looked at the complaint I found that it was looking for what appeared to be a nonexistent file. I am not sure now, but it was something like kdelibs-3.5.4 and the server it was searching on, something which ended in ...packages-6.1-release I think, had only kdelibs-3.5.1. As a matter of fact, I went through all the directories I could find online (including 6 and 7 stable, release and current) and was unable to find the package my system was looking for in any of them. This failure, and the confusion which ensued, are what cause me to wonder just how to keep things like the aforementioned firefox up to date. I am now in a situation where I am unsure of what to do as regards updates, and can really find nothing which clarifies things much online. Everything I find says to run cvsup and use a supfile entirely like that which I used before, and that did not work out. How do I use new, more secure ports and yet still be able to use binary packages? Is updating ports with cvsup the only way? And if so, what did I do wrong before? The inability to use binary packages for giant, though in my case needed, bloatware like kde made me leave Gentoo behind and I want to know whether that is the only future for FreeBSD too. I am assuming that since there are binary packages online for these files they must be usable, I just don't know how to get to them from tools like portupgrade. Or if that is how you even try to upgrade a system from packages. I just can't find any really relevant guides for this type of thing, so I am supposing that everyone just compiles everything. Any help in this is very much appreciated, and sorry if I am overlooking super obvious information somewhere about this. I probably am, but I just can't find it. Patrick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
