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Things look quiet here. But I've been doing a lot of blogging at dan.langille.org because I prefer WordPress now. Not all my posts there are FreeBSD related. I am in the midst of migrating The FreeBSD Diary over to WordPress (and you can read about that here). Once the migration is completed, I'll move the FreeBSD posts into the new FreeBSD Diary website.

Updating the ports collection 17 January 1999

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This section shows you how I updated my ports collection. I'll assume you have already installed cvsup.

If you need just one port refreshed, try reading Installing a port without installing the ports.

Why update the ports?

I was trying to make Midnight Commander. But it wasn't working. Here's the message I was getting:

[root@ns:/usr/ports/misc/mc] # make clean
Cleaning for mc-4.1.35
[root@ns:/usr/ports/misc/mc] # make
mc-4.1.35 is marked as broken: mountlist.c.

I was told that 4.1.35 was not the latest version and that I should get 4.5.1. CVSup provides an easy way to update these ports.

The template

I started with /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile. I copied this file to /usr/home/ports-supfile and then modified it to match my requirements. Here is the change I made:

*default host=cvsup.au.FreeBSD.org

I changed my server to one near me.

NOTE: Don't worry about releases/version when cvsup'ing your ports. There is only one version of the Ports collection. All versions of FreeBSD use the same ports collection. Therefore, when updating your ports use this tag:

tag=.

Different needs - different ports

The stock example file will give you all of the ports. But I didn't want that. So I also commented out the "ports-all" line and uncommented the "ports-misc" line. Actually, when I do this update, I often modify the file according to my needs at the time.

You should not comment out ports-base. See When cvsup'ing your ports, remember the base distribution for what might happen if you do.

I'm thinking about using one file for my regular port updates (every day) and another file for the give-them-to-me-NOW occasions which so often occur. With this approach, I can keep my regular ports refreshed and ready to upgrade but still be able to cvsup specific ports collections as and when needed.

If you need just one port refreshed, try reading Installing a port without installing the ports.

Running

This is so easy, it's silly.

cvsup -P m ports-supfile

Actually, can get away with just:

cvsup ports-supfile

Try that and see if it works. I had to use the first example because of a firewall issue. You may be able to get away with the second example.

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