Michel Talon wrote: > > This is nice to know, i was under the impression i was so dumb as > being unable to use portupgrade (yes, my experience is not far from > yours) when so many people swear on the bible that they regularly > upgrade their machine with portupgrade without a single hiccup :-) > >
It nigh always worked for me and I always did it on production systems, too. The notable exception is that when updating Perl, more often than not, Perl modules needed recompiling which it didn't ever do for me. However, a portupgrade -f "p5*" always took care of that for me. OTOH, I'd be the last to say portupgrade is perfect. It has it's place and surely scratches a bad itch with FreeBSD. As for apt, I use a KUbuntu (a Debian derivative) on my desktop. Apt isn't entirely foolproof either, it has done weird stuff more than once on my machine (including, but that was reportedly caused by a broken package, shredding my .kde). Long story short: the perfect system doesn't yet exist. OSX .app approach comes close but is totally different paradigm and not really what a BSD should be after. Library issues aside, self contained binaries would however be a nice thing. At least installing everything in it's own /usr/local subdir and then just symlinking the commands into the path could greatly reduce the clutter in /usr.
