Upgrading and rebuilding ALL packages/ports

[chill]

Hi I wanted to:

#portmaster -af


to rebuild and upgrade everything on my 7.0 system. Is this generally an ok thing to do or am I likely going to face some dependency/instability issues by doing so? All feedback welcome.

Thanks

[ninjatux]

Why do you want to rebuild everything? Upgrading is fine.

[chill]

Why do you want to rebuild everything?
Why not? I just started using FreeBSD so its not like I'm rebuilding 4 gigs of software, plus you get cool compile options from the ncurses menus that you dont get from the binary packages you already have installed.

[ninjatux]

The compile options allow you to enable or disable certain bits of functionality. You should be careful of what you're doing. Also, if you're using portmaster, then you won't get the menu. You will need to set per-package options by hand in your make.conf. Either that or manually cd into every ports directory and compile manually.

[robbak]

I thought that I'd clarify that a bit: An increasing number of ports display options when the ports build. This is part of the port infrastructure, and these options will be shown when you build a port for the first time using portmaster or portupgrade. portmaster even goes through the ports you are going to build and displays any config options for any unconfigured ports up front, so you don't have to baby-sit the build.

But there are other options in ports that have not or cannot be moved to this system. These ones must be set in /etc/make.conf, or by using portsconf or portmaster's config file. (One of the admins recently posted a complicated make.conf file that sets options depending on what port you are building. portsconf does a similar thing, but is less messy.)

Port options set can be changed by running make config, and can be cleared by running make rmconfig in the port directory. The values are stored in files located in /var/db/ports, but directly editing them is not recommended.

[TerryP]

be sure to read/usr/ports/UPDATING before hand, it can save some headaches from time to time ;-)

[chill]

be sure to read/usr/ports/UPDATING before hand, it can save some headaches from time to time ;-)
lol I tried earlier today. Its a fairly exhaustive list, I was running down the list trying to match my ports that had available upgrades against the UPDATING file, it was all a bit much for me. The upgrading process seems a lot easier to me to let portmaster upgrade whatever it wants to upgrade and if something breaks I can deal with it when it happens. I'm only using FreeBSD as a desktop replacement on one of my laptops so if something happens to go wrong I'm not in an environment where it matters that much. :D

[TerryP]

The entries in updating are sorted by date ;-)


20080601: -> year 2008, morh 06, day 01 of month (ISO format w/o separators).

It's always been on my to do list to write a small perl snip it to grep that file and only report entries for installed programs within a range of dates. I've never written it because I've always felt it such a typical thing that it must be in ports some where waiting for me to find it ;-)

[chill]

It's always been on my to do list to write a small perl snip it to grep that file and only report entries for installed programs within a range of dates.
That would be real sweet. The first time I checked the UPDATING file I thought that somehow it would only relate to what I had on my system. :o

Security updates are really the only thing I'm worried about. Besides http://www.vuxml.org/freebsd/ is there any other good way of finding the latest security issues?

EDIT: ignore my last question