[geeks] freebsd and package tools

[Michael-John Turner]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 08:00:36PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> If we were on release-7.0, how would it be different?

The advantage you have is that you could use ports tagged as 'known
working' for 7.0-RELEASE. Of course, that would be a frozen snapshot -
newer/updated ports released post 7.0-RELEASE wouldn't have that tag.
Tracking 7-STABLE would give you a mix - not bleeding-edge -CURRENT
packages, but more up-to-date than -RELEASE packages.

> I'm not sure you can pick out specific milestones with ports. It seems  
> all the tools I played with today just pick out the latest, and I don't 
> see options to get specific versions of the ports tree, except of course 
> the release versions.

You should be able to. According to the documentation on CVS tags[1], ports
should be tagged in the same way as the main source tree. Must admit, I've
never tried that - I always stick to HEAD, as in my experience 99% of
-CURRENT ports build and work fine on a -RELEASE or -STABLE system.

> Originally I thought ports was something you could use on any system, but 
> they seem to eventually outgrow your machine.

That /should/ be the case for the most part, but I guess not all
combinations are tested, so there can be some breakage.

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/cvs-tags.html

-mj
-- 
Michael-John Turner 
mj at mjturner.net      <>  http://mjturner.net/