> On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 07:26:24PM -0600, 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? > > Updated packages can always be found on the mirrors, under > /pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/<myarch>. > > While this always lags behind the ports tree a little, it's usually > sufficient; in rare cases (security problems?), you want to get a port > ASAP and will have to compile it yourself. This is the exception, > though. > > Joachim > > I should clarify the issue a bit. What I would like to do is start doing build testing or the ports tree to assist the developers with finging build errors as well as run tim errors. I have been running pkg_add -ui via a cron script on my laptop to keep that atleast snapshop current but I would like know if their is some thing that I set to be able to help with build errors esp with flavors of the ports. Packages work wonderfully on my test laptop I am just hoping to find a way to help test as best as possiable while I get my programming skills up to an OpenBSD passable level and help port new applications. An example of what I am looking for in OpenBSD is FreeBSD's portupgrade command that only rebulids the out of date ports with the tree sync'd via cvs. I do understand that there will be times that I will need to rebuild everything this way (gettext upgrades for an example) but I would prefer not to have to do this on a daily basis, say rebuild the few ports that change every day with commits. The ports@ list gets alot of requests for testing new diffs on a daily basis and I am wanting to help as much as possiable.
Thanks Michael
