While I fully realize that installing from ports is not the accepted
process for anyone except for developers, I wish to start helping out
in any way I can; though, being a low-skilled OpenBSD programmer
tends to hurt more then help.
I started looking at using my spare machine (it only plays music to
the stereo and has a lot of unused cycles) to help test snapshots and
new ports. After bringing the base system to current, I found it a
major headache to update the ports from the initial 3.9 stable branch
to current. The problem stemmed from trying to build updated ports
and having to manually pkg_delete all of my previously installed
software and rebuild from scratch. It seemed rather silly to me to
manually tear my entire system down for updates when I could be
better using the system to test the installed applications.
Thinking about how a lot of developers use OpenBSD as their main
system (and presuming that they are not mixing stable with current) I
feel there must be a more efficient way of updating the installed
packages/ports. It seems that this type of updating would be a
tremendous time sink for those actually doing the hard work. Would
anyone care to share their tips on keeping their own machines current
without having to uninstall/reinstall every time they update?
- Automating updates question Michael Osburn
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