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Hi,

> The reason I ask is that I have struggled for the last two years to find easy but good ways to update all the packages on my system without losing those that don't build (it's no fun to restart apache only to realize it's no longer installed). I have read about many different methods which seem to work, but couldn't find one that was simple enough that I trusted myself not to futz it up.

Funny, I hade the exact same surprise the first time I used "make 
upgrade" on Apache... :-/

I'm sure it has been discussed here before, but the way "portupgrade" (a 
very handy Ruby script written for the FreeBSD Ports) handles this 
situation is to create a temporary tarball of the old files just before 
the "make deinstall / make reinstall" phase, and restore them from the 
tarball if "make reinstall" returned an error. It should be possible to 
borrow ideas (or code) from here...

Laurent.

-- 

     Laurent DAVERIO
     Centre de Recherche en Informatique
     de l'École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (CRI-ENSMP)
     35, Rue Saint-Honoré
     77305 FONTAINEBLEAU CEDEX
     FRANCE                               Tel:    (+33|0) 1.64.69.48.37
                                          Fax:    (+33|0) 1.64.69.48.47
                                          E-mail: laurent@daverio.net
                                          http://daverio.net/
					 La Page Trad : http://trad.org/



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