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Re: about "www/firefox"



Kinoshita Daisuke <kinoshita%astro.ncu.edu.tw@localhost> writes:

> Thank you for the information.

So first, as nia@ explained about firefox, in theory the dependency
information should be correct, and the people doing firefox updates have
been careful, so for firefox it is in this case.  In practice it
sometimes is not, and I tend to want to operate in a way that doesn't
depend on that.

> Then, all the installed packages should be removed and re-built if
> pkgsrc tree is updated, is this what you mean?
> Or, you mean current tree is not encouraged for most users?

It's totally up to you what you want to do.

The stable branches get only bug and security fixes and in theory do not
have API/ABI changes.  In practice we achieve this very well.  And,
there are (after a build delay) binary packages for NetBSD releases on a
few architectures, and also for smartos/illumos, mac, and some kinds of
gnu/linux.

pkgsrc-current is much less stable, although generally things build, and
if not it is almost always fixed quickly.  This is a good choice if you
want to participate in updating/fixing things, or if you want to test
what's' happening so that things you care about work for the next
branch.

And, if you are running current, I think it's best to keep everything up
to date. with the tree.  That to me means to "cvs up" the entire tree
(or the equivalent from a mirror), and then to bring all installed
packages up to date.  That doesn't mean every package needs updating,
and depending on how long since the last time, can be nearly all or just
a few.

See
  https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/getting.html
  https://wiki.netbsd.org/pkgsrc/how_to_upgrade_packages/

I use pkg_rolling-replace.  The other approach you should consider is to
do either a bulk build or the equivalent on a machine where you don't
need packages to work, and then use pkgin to update from your own binary
sets.

If any of this is too hard or not fun, then you should use the stable
branches.

However, the same issues of updating apply when changing stable
branches.   But, if you wait until there are binary packages, and use
pkgin, you should be able to avoid most trouble.

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