On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, Michael Osburn wrote:
> 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?
Ehhh, I don't know how you are trying to update, buta I just do
pkg_add -ui with a PKG_PATH pointing to my favorite mirror snapshot dir.
First I make sure I have an up-to-date base system, of course;
sometimes built from src, sometimes I install a snapshot. Unless you are
working on tge src tree, I would recommend installing a snap.
-Otto
