View Single Post
  #6   (View Single Post)  
Old 19th September 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
ISO Quartermaster
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
Posts: 507
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by wubrgamer View Post
I like being able to say my system is "fully up to date"
I'd caution you that this is not really a good idea. One example is the large meta-packages like Gnome or KDE, and I'll use the former as an example.

You install and upgrade it from the gnome2 metaport, which has all the various bits and pieces. When a new release, major or minor, comes out, you can update the metaport, and UPDATING has the details on how to do that. The minor updates are (usually ) no big deal, but the updating between major versions is. You have to do it right, or you break things.

Once that release is out, the component pieces continue to be updated. So if your computer is "fully up-to-date" you have some of these pieces that are not intended to be used unless you know what you are doing. Between minor releases this usually is not a big deal. But if you hit the boundary between the last minor release and a major upgrade, you can cause all sorts of mischief.

So it depends on what you mean by having your computer be fully up-to-date. Gnome2 can be current, but the libraries and some of the pieces may not be.

I would never, ever, recommend that someone upgrade all the ports at once. Unless you run a simple system this method is guaranteed to result in breakage that will take a long time to fix.

Instead, upgrade it in pieces. I break it roughly as X11 and video drivers, gnome2 and its pieces, and "other" including math packages, things like gimp and ImageMagick and Acroread -- in general, ports that do not really depend on a lot of other stuff. That's not clean either, but that has worked pretty well for me over the years. But keep your eye out for upgrade to things like gettext, which require every port to be upgraded.

I also think that having something that works is much better than getting the latest and greatest new features. Usually there are new bugs that are introduced too. For example, I would never recommend that a new major update of Gnome be installed unless you like hunting bugs or you REALLY need something new. Usually by .1 it has settled down enough to be pretty useful, and by the .3 (namely, just before the new version) it works really well.

YMMV
Reply With Quote