Hi. gad@FreeBSD here. My life at work and "on the personal front" continues to be a time-consuming morass, so I haven't contributed much to FreeBSD discussions for the last few years.
I wanted to bring up a strategy I have used for ports in the threads on "the ports collection has some serious issues", but that thread has gone all over the map while I've been swamped at work (due to the end- of-semester rush here at RPI). So, here's a new thread just to make a few observations: 1) running a ports collection of the magnitude of the FreeBSD ports collection is a massive challenge. Hats off to anyone who works on any of the tools for it. It's easy to see why people might get burned out while working on ports. 2) I happen to use portupgrade, possibly just because I like ruby. I did try using poudriere, but it doesn't happen to work well for my current systems. I could certainly see using poudriere (or maybe synth?) in the future, if my situation changes. 3) I'm not here to debate what anyone else should use. This is just a short note about a strategy that I've used a few times, and which has worked well-enough for me. Like anyone else, I sometimes get into situations where my set of ports is "in a mess", and I have trouble upgrading some package or groups of packages. I would guess that I end up in this kind of mess every 18-24 months, on average. Here's a terse description of how I extract myself from that mess. On all my machines I have plenty of disk space. So I create duplicates of '/', '/var', and '/usr'. Also, I have '/usr/ports' in a partition of its own. I unmount /usr/ports, and then mount: # df -kl /dev/ada0p39 1586716 823228 636552 56% /xx/rePort /dev/ada0p40 2082716 538732 1377368 28% /xx/rePort/var /dev/ada0p41 9016380 3389188 4905884 41% /xx/rePort/usr /dev/ada0p33 5450748 898376 4116316 18% /xx/rePort/usr/ports I execute: # mount -t devfs devfs /xx/rePort/dev # mount -t fdescfs fdesc /xx/rePort/dev/fd so that I'll also have: devfs 1 1 0 100% /xx/rePort/dev fdescfs 1 1 0 100% /xx/rePort/dev/fd I then have one session chroot-ed into '/xx/rePort', and another remaining outside of that. In short, I then blow away all ports which are inside 'rePort', and build my entire collection up from scratch. This also forces me to look over all the ports I have, and sometimes that is a good idea all by itself. This is always a good time to try upgrading to new major-versions of perl and python, for instance. Now I'm skipping over a lot of details here, but the basic idea is to build a brand-new /usr/local from scratch, *WITHOUT* touching anything is currently in /usr/local. I can test many of those packages by running them inside the rePort chroot, and I can do a variety of comparisons between the active /usr/local (config files, etc) and the new one. Note that I can do this at my own pace. Maybe it'll take me a week or two, building and cross-checking ports in my spare time. And once I'm optimistic enough, I'll rsync /xx/rePort/usr/local back to /usr/local-new on the real system. I can then try switching between the old and new via 'mv /usr/local /usr/local-old && mv /usr/local-new /usr/local'. There's additional work to move info under '/xx/rePort/var' to where it belongs in the real '/var'. There's some other things I do, but this message is already pretty long. I also have some notes on ways that maybe this could be improved, assuming I ever have the spare time. (I'll also note that I make snapshots of all the rePort partitions before I start, so that I can use those snapshots to find *everything* which has changed under rePorts when I'm done). I just thought I'd mention this idea, in case it might help out someone who finds themselves in a mess when upgrading ports, and they can't afford a lot of downtime to clean up the mess. Cheers to all, and to all a good night. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = dro...@rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or g...@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy, NY; USA _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
