Upgrading /usr/ports

[ClaptonOrient]

Can anyone tell me how to renew my /usr/ports offline ?

portaudit tells me some packages are out-of-date. My FreeBSD box is on dial-up, so ...

- I downloaded ports.tgz from ftp.freebsd.org on another machine.
- mv'ed the old /usr/ports to .../portsOLD
- untarred the ports.tgz

But I get the same old ports ! Worse, when I try to install a port I'm told that particular version's gone.

Thanks for any help.

[mfaridi]

You need Internet connection for update or upgrade your port tree.

[stukov]

Updating the ports tree won't update the applications you have installed. You can use "portmaster" or "portupgrade" to update a specific application.

Maybe I don't understand what you are trying to do exactly. Do you have the exact error messages?

[lvlamb]

If you want the latest ports.tgz, you obviously would need to check the dates.
Remember that there only is one ports tree, so it is OK to download the ports.tgz from the latest -current available, regardless of the OS version number. Or from a snapshot.

A ports.tgz from a -release is frozen for that release and will not change.

Also, you still will need an Internet connection, even for pkg_add'ing ports and the needed dependencies.

[cajunman4life]

I'd recommend that next time you're dialed-up, run portsnap. It will update your ports tree and will save you tons of bandwidth (and time). Unfortunately the first time you run it, it will probably take a while as many ports have been updated/added/removed since -release.

[ClaptonOrient]

thanks everyone


in the end, I followed cajun's route: 3 hours on portsnap fetch, but after ... extract I have a squeaky clean ports collection. definitely time for dsl!

(with hindsight, portsnap update might have been quicker ...)

[nniemeyer]

Portsnap is definitely the way to go. Here is a great PDF to read over if your interested, it may take you a bit to pull over 56k.
http://www.daemonology.net/papers/bsdcan07.pdf

Also, the general guideline from my understanding is:

First Run of Portsnap
portsnap fetch && portsnap extract

Updating the Ports Tree thereafter
portsnap fetch && portsnap update

[cajunman4life]

portsnap update is only after you have run portsnap fetch once. The first fetch you run downloads everything which is why it took a while. Future "fetch"'s should go much faster as you're only downloading what has changed since you last ran fetch.

[phoenix]

portsnap fetch && portsnap extract can be reduced to portsnap fetch extract, and portsnap fetch && portsnap update can be reduced to portsnap fetch update.

[schrodinger]

If you are using dial up to upgrade your ports let me suggest something.

Install /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portupgrade and after running portsnap run

portupgrade -FrRa

This should fetch all the installation packages that you need to fully upgrade all the out of date ports. When they've finished downloading, I'd disconnect your dial-up and reconnect again when it's over

[Oliver_H]

For a dial-up user it would be easier to install portmaster because there is no plethora of dependencies to build ;-)

[jb_daefo]

make fetch-recursive
make fetch-url-list
wget -c -nd [some file]
..........................
I use those all the time when on dialup (once the ports
tree is upto date; another trick:
csup -g -L 2 -i ports/[CATEGORY/[PORT your-ports-supfile
runs real quickly if you know a port has an update (freshports org)
.........................
I have several ports-supfile (supfile-port.a supfile-port.b etc)
in /usr/ports so that if one update isnt at server A yet, it might
be on server B.
.....................