Re: how to upgrade a whole machine ...

["Justin C. Sherrill" <justin%shiningsilence.com@localhost>]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 9:20 am, Herb Peyerl wrote:
> 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'...

Just to chime in from a different perspective: DragonFly's been using
pkgsrc packages with a great deal of success, thanks to the efforts of
Joerg and others to include DragonFly changes.

However, upgrading packages isn't any easier on DragonFly.  I've been
stumbling along, trying to build pkgsrc binaries using pbulk so that we
can get as close as possible to binary-only upgrades on DragonFly.
There's plenty of solutions for upgrading pkgsrc that people have
documented, but they all are somewhat cumbersome.  I'd suggest that pkgsrc
doesn't lack a way to upgrade as much as it lacks a _clear_ way to
upgrade.  Any number of scripts that require setting up a chroot and
issuing multiple command with multiple modifiers aren't really the
solutions people want.

I think what people want (and I'd sure enjoy) is something that boils down
to a verb and an object.  The upgrade methods that people actually enjoy
take this form: 'portupgrade foo-1.2' or 'apt-get install foo-1.2'.  It
doesn't matter how messy it can get or how long it takes behind the
scenes; as long as it can do it in a DWIMmy way, without falling down. 
The tool pkg_radd is DragonFly's attempt to get a bit closer to that.

If it helps, my notes from setting up pbulk for bulk builds are on the
DragonFly wiki:

http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.cgi/PbulkBuilding