how to upgrade a whole machine ...

[Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl%beer.org@localhost>]

For some reason, I feel like an idiot posting this, but I gotta say, I  
just don't get pkgsrc... I feel like I'm having a newbie moment but  
I'm not a newbie... I've been using NetBSD since it was founded  
(obviously) but always been rather behind the curve on 'how to do  
things the NetBSD-way'...

I decided I needed to upgrade an old 3.0 machine to 4.x with a fairly  
modern pkgsrc.. I upgraded the kernel and userland ok (after some  
teething issues with postfix)... Then it came time to do pkgsrc...

After much anguish, I took one of agc's pkg_comp files and some notes  
he sent me, and tried to learn how to use pkg_comp to build all the  
binary packages I needed in hopes I could clear-cut my /usr/pkg and  
reinstall updated packages... Well, after letting pkg_comp churn for  
about 15 hours, I was left with a bunch of binary pkg's.. I then used  
pkg_chk -ab to install them into my fresh new /usr/pkg, but it turns  
out I didn't put dependancies for my top-level packages into my  
pkg_comp config file, so, for example, it built a binary package for  
postgrey but didn't build any of the postgrey dependancies (p5-* and  
db4)... I'm not sure how it managed to convince itself that it could  
install postgrey into the chroot without building the dependancies but  
that's an aside...

My whole point of writing this, is that I couldn't have done any of  
this without the help of other long-time NetBSD developers...

I tried reading http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/index.html because  
there's a lot of instructions there and surely what I want to do is in  
there.. But it's not... The closest thing I could find in there was  
'doing a bulk build' but the top of that doc says "don't do this. this  
document is old and not relevant anymore." leading one to look at the  
docs for 'pbuild' which has a big "TODO, look at the wiki".  ... But  
it doesn't really look like that's what I want to do anyway ...

Now it could be that I'm just not looking in the right spot for the  
"how to upgrade an old NetBSD machine to a new NetBSD machine with new  
versions of all of your packages" document, or it could be that it  
just doesn't exist ... Querying a few other NetBSD devs in icb, it  
seems everyone has a different way of doing this...

I work in a lab with about 20 developers working on an embedded NetBSD  
product.. Everyone has at least one or 2 NetBSD machines on their  
desktop as development boxes, plus their target rigs (which run  
NetBSD)... Everyone in that lab is afraid of pkgsrc... Some of these  
people are penguinistas who, after having been forced to use NetBSD,  
can't wait for the project to end so they can go back to penguix..  
Whenever someone needs to update a NetBSD machine, they burn it down  
and rebuild it from scratch because pkgsrc is intractable...

I'm writing this prematurely because I'm on my 3rd attempt at building  
the binary packages I need for my mail server.  My mail server is  
colocated somewhere.  It doesn't even have a DVD drive... I can't just  
burn it down to the ground and rebuild it from scratch... I need to  
upgrade it in-situ and I need to do it remotely...  Why isn't there an  
obvious way to do this?   Why is this black magic?

I'm frustrated, think about the less experienced NetBSD users who  
we're trying to attract and ask how they're supposed to figure this  
out?  Not everyone is a pkgsrc developer.