OpenBSD Journal

Upgrade Tools for Packages

Contributed by jose on from the new-releases dept.

3.3 is coming down to us pretty soon and it's time to start thinking about upgrading. This can be a somewhat time consuming process if you have a lot of custom changes and tweaks or if you haven't upgraded in a while. Two tools may be useful here (in addition to mergemaster, in ports). The first is Nikolan Sturm's port update tool . Currently no clean way exists to magically upgrade a port and its dependencies in the ports tree, handling other packages that change, as well. Nikolay's experimental tool works pretty well for most situations, and may be worth looking at for your system.

Another tool that does this job is Openbechede . Leandro, the main author of the software, has just released version 0.14, which has several improvements over the last major release, 0.7.1.

As you move closer to 3.3, you may want to start looking at these tools to help you upgrade your system more smoothly.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Perhaps someone should take the time to adapt FreeBSD's portupgrade. It's an excellent tool.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      yes it is a good tool, but it is a messy ruby script. clean it up, and submit it please. =)

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        If you think it's messy, chances are good you've never looked at it. Are all Perl scripts convoluted?

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward () on

          yes

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward () on

            So sad.

      2. By chester_b () chester@ithryn.net on mailto:chester@ithryn.net

        I don't think ruby is in the default install of OpenBSD, is it? So what is in the default OpenBSD install that this could be ported to? Python?

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward () on

          Perl is in the default install

          Comments
          1. By chester () on

            yuck, would be unreasonable to have it depend on ruby? It would be nice to keep an OpenBSD version of the script as close the the FreeBSD one as possible so bringing in changes would be easy.

            Comments
            1. By kremlyn () on

              Or, we could start with a fresh project and not copy blatantly what the FreeBSD project has done. That way we can build a tool we need, as we want it.

              Comments
              1. By Anonymous Coward () on

                true, but then we'd be reinventing the wheel. FreeBSD's needed is not that far from OpenBSD's need, so i don't see any reason in simply porting what FreeBSD already has to OpenBSD. I don't think copying is a bad idea, at least, not in this case.

  2. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Speaking of 3.3, is there any roadmap out yet, any planned release date ?

    Comments
    1. By grey () on

      Before you ask a common question, be sure to check the FAQ.

      For that specific query, look here:

      http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html#Next

    2. By Anonymous Coward () on

      I believe it will be around May 1.

  3. By W () on

    I just 'pkg_info > foo' and install them manually (through the ports tree) for each release. The ports tree deals with dependencies too.

  4. By Andreas Taenzer () aki@yahoo.com on mailto:aki@yahoo.com

    Less dependencies (ruby) than portupgrade.
    It may be too intertwained though with pkgsrc.

    It works perfect and take care of dependencies/upgrades etc.

    May be somebody smart (=other than me) can look into.

    Andreas

  5. By Marc Espie () espie@openbsd.org on mailto:espie@openbsd.org

    there are some plans to handle updates in the future.
    It's not ready for 3.3, I haven't had enough time to finish it...

    Anyways, you'll notice that every package description comes with a
    @comment subdir=www/mod_perl cdrom=yes ftp=yes
    line (and has for a while now), so that identifying package
    sources and checking whether an update is necessary will be easier.

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