I just upgraded my laptop from kde 3.5.1 taking a shot at using portupgrade
and/or portmanager. From my previous experience portupgrade has been greatly
enhanced/simplified. portmanager builds a database that gives a great status
report and identifies orphaned port/packages. IMO these packages compliment one
another.
The problems with these tools are largely (I think) not of their own making.
They depend on the ports tree and/or packages to accurately define requirements
and dependencies. OpenOffice, to name one package, does not do this. Further, if
you run kde (and probably any other comparable desktop), the interactions of
dependencies are hopelessly complex. If you do not stay 'reasonably' current,
using these tools (even as good as they are now) is much more complex and takes
longer that simply clearing things out and starting over. The PC-BSD project
seems to address this issue by picking a working set of ports. In my case I
upgrade when a have a spare moment or when kde is around a year old.
I decided I would install and look at port manager first, mostly because of my
previous (and outdated) experience with portupgrade. portmanager currently does
not allow (or attempt) to use packages, so I also installed portupgrade.
My plan of attack was to remove kde and OpenOffice and try to upgrade the
remaining ports/packages. My next step was to use portmanager to remove the
orphaned (leaf) ports. This is not a good plan because this does not
(necessarily) yield the set of ports that the kde package requires, and some of
the leaf ports were both up-to-date and later required.
Currently my laptop has nothing on it except kde 3.5.6, openopenoffice 2.2.0 and
gaim. This requires something in excess of 200 ports. Starting from a base more
than a year out of date, the upgrade tools did not have a chance to work
(easily). I ended up with 2.5 days of building and required a second pass to
clean up some dependencies. I then installed the kde package and had to
uninstall one or two ports because dependency conflicts. OpenOffice installed
with no issues other than the package from the OpenOffice site did not require
its dependencies all of which I had erroneously removed as leafs.
For some, the above is a bit complex (if not daunting) and I certainly do not
have enough resources to build kde and OpenOffice from scratch. that process
would add at least a week to the time I spent building.
For a desktop system either constructed from packages or that has not been
updated for several months, I think a viable alternative is to clear things out
and install from packages starting with your desktop. This takes about two hours
after you are familiar with the process and assumes using twm which is built
into Xorg. If Xorg needs updating that must be done from the console. Xorg takes
just a few minutes if a current version is available on cdrom.
Using portupgrade with the noexecute option will give a sense of how complex
upgrading will be. In some cases I still find starting over to be a viable and
easier option to portupgrade/portmanager. To me it has the advantage
over PC-BSD of having a more current set of applications.
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