Dealing with ports

Recently I came across of a more "posh", if you will, way to deal with ports. Instead of trusty old cvsup I was recommended to try out portsnap, which cames in FreeBSD base system for a while already - specifically, since 6.0. Older than that, just use ports-mgmt/portsnap port.

It is very easy to use - in fact, I find it easier than cvsupdate.

First, you need to fetch a compressed snapshot of the ports tree.
# portsnap fetch

Next, a live copy of ports tree should be extracted in /usr/ports - the manual mentions you should do this regardless even if there is one created with cvsup.
# portsnap extract

That was for the first time. After that, it's just update
# portsnap fetch update


Next thing I found very handy was http://www.freshports.org/ports-mgmt/portupgrade/. Now unlike the vanilla cd /usr/ports/portdir && make install clean, it can actually update dependencies as well. Nice. Comes with a set of handy utilities - portinstall, pkg_deinstall etc.

pkg_add and an old FreeBSD 5.4 installation

Hellllo.

Just before the New Years, I got this need to upgrade our software on one of our servers. It requires some packages, and so I went to install them.

As I already knew, I was out of luck with pkg_add -r, since the files for FreeBSD 5.4 aren't on FreeBSD's FTP server anymore for a while already.

Minutes later, aunt Google came to help, suggesting that I read FreeBSD manual
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/packages-using.html

shortly, the solution was:
setenv PACKAGESITE ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-stable/Latest/

:)