NetBSD - binary package upgrade on 6.1.5

[Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost>]

Hi,

I have an old system which is running 6.1.5. The installed packages on 
it were mixed and obsolete. Being slow and with little ram, I thought 
that upgrading everything with binary packages would be the best bet.

I learned about the existence of pkg_chk -b -u and it sounded perfect!

As a repository I used:

http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/6.1.5/All/

The effect is a bit a disaster:

Missing: devel/apr devel/apr-util sysutils/dbus textproc/icu www/serf 
devel/apr devel/apr-util sysutils/dbus textproc/icu www/serf devel/atk 
devel/cmake devel/glib2 devel/gobject-introspection devel/pango 
devel/subversion-base editors/emacs24 editors/vim-gtk2 fonts/harfbuzz 
graphics/cairo-gobject graphics/gdk-pixbuf2 graphics/librsvg lang/clang 
multimedia/gst-plugins0.10-base multimedia/gstreamer0.10 net/libIDL 
sysutils/desktop-file-utils textproc/libcroco textproc/xmlrpc-c 
wm/windowmaker www/seamonkey x11/gtk2

and, indeed most of these packages do not exist: some of them are 
"important" like icu, subversion-base, clang

I checked also in older builds and it is missing in 6.1.x

Interestingly I checked here:

http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/6.0_2017Q4/All/

And some of the packages I am missing were recently built for 6.0 (e.g. 
subversion-base, seamonkey). Why not for 6.1.x?

Do you think I can mix 6.0 and 6.1 up? I still do miss windowmaker, 
clang and icu. though


Second, I bumped into a problem I have seen other have issues with: 
upgrading of osabi and x11-links fails, because it says that I have a 
different platform than the host it was built on. No solution for this? 
I even thought: fine, let me build osabi from source and try upgrading 
again, but still pkg_chk would want to upgrade (actually, downgrade) my 
freshly built osabi package.


Cheers,

Riccardo