On 4/14/13, Marc Espie <es...@nerim.net> wrote: > On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 11:40:09PM -0400, Alan Corey wrote: >> I'm not sure how to look this up, and it doesn't seem to be in the FAQ. > > There does not seem to be a question in your message...
I'm just wordy, I'll get to it. > >> I frequently add stuff that isn't in ports by building from sources. >> Sometimes this real world stuff needs newer versions of other things >> than what's in ports. But the port is already installed and has >> things depending on it. So I have to uninstall the dependencies, >> uninstall the port, then install the newer version. Sometimes I can >> take the distfile from the uninstalled dependency and build it as a >> generic tarball outside the ports system, sometimes it has too many >> patches to make it worthwhile. > > sometimes there is an update in the works. sometimes some of those pesky > other ports have to be fixed as well. It can get complicated. The question is what's the best way to mix current stuff in, I wasn't criticizing. It's actually handy to do an install and be able to reuse a fair percentage of distfiles. Can't do that with packages. There are things in my 5.2 box that use the same distfiles as my 4.7 box. For the most part I don't mind old - there probably aren't many bugs or it would have been replaced. But fltk is one of those that applications are mostly written for a certain version. It's like jdk or gcc that way, except you can only have 1 version installed at a time. > >> For example: I've just gotten fldigi running under 5.0 and 5.2, but >> the fltk 1.x in ports is too old to work. I had to uninstall it, >> which meant aqsis had to be uninstalled. Turns out there's a newer >> aqsis too but I haven't started on that yet. >> >> I'm not in a position to make updated ports because I don't run current. > > Why not ? I mean you say you have a 5.0 installation and a 5.2 one. That > sounds complicated enough already. So why not have a -current install ? > it's not harder than 5.0/5.2. I don't try to install new things on my 4.7 box often but it still works fine. The native gcc is 3.3.5 is the main reason. It also has gcc 4.2.4 from ports but it doesn't work quite as well that way. > > (besides 5.0 is no longer supported, so you'll have to update that one > anyways). > This is ridiculous. A whole year and a half and it's been abandoned. Look at how long FreeBSD or Debian supports their versions. Back in the early 90's I used to play with Slackware, downloading each version onto floppies, bringing it home and installing it, usually just in time to do it all over with the next version. I didn't know how to do much else with it, but I was learning. Now I actually /use/ OpenBSD, every day, on 3-4 machines. Consider them production machines even though I'm retired. I do experimental things with the likes of Gnuradio and the Osmocom suite lately, not the operating system. I might replace an operating system once in the 3-5 year expected life of a hard drive. I could understand if Microsoft stopped supporting Vista, because it was so bad many places wouldn't even use it, but OpenBSD 5.0 isn't that different from 5.2. Some things don't work under 5.2, just as some things don't work under 5.0. You fix bugs, you introduce new ones, it isn't always an improvement from the user's perspective. We used to have a policy of never buying a Windows version until the first service pack came out. I ran -current once when I had a job with an internet connection, but only to get some feature. As soon as the next release came out I wiped it clean and installed the release. ----------------- Once again we're off on a tangent and I never got an answer to my question of how to mix ports and non-ports versions of things. Something like a way to uninstall a port without having to uninstall everything that depends on it. Or replace a port from sources and leave everything else in place. Alan Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX
