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Old 20th September 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
ISO Quartermaster
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
Posts: 507
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I don't understand your question entirely, but I keep an eye on the major metaports I use: X11, Gnome and "the rest". When X11 has a major upgrade, I let it pass for a while until it settles down. You can keep an eye on the lists for the issues.

I have hunted down a lot of bugs in Gnome, so I often upgrade at the beta stage, and contribute bug reports. Usually I find a dozen or so. There are more early on, and by .1 the port is in decent shape.

The others are less important to me, and don't change as much.

The bottom line is that you can keep an eye on what is happening from the lists, and somewhat from what ports are not up-to-date. For gnome, there are all sorts of ports that upgrade along the way; until there is an upgrade to gnome2, well, don't upgrade any of those (unless there is a bug that bites you) until the metaport upgrade. Then decide if you want it.

Sadly, you have to know what you have installed, how those ports relate to other things you have installed, and keep an eye on what is upgraded and when. It does take some work.

You can get the hang of it after a while. But simply doing an upgrade of all ports whenever you decide to do it is just not wise. FWIW, I keep an eye on things and spend a day or two upgrading every three months or so. I go from source, but using packages is not really that different if you know that the packages have some delay in being built.
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