[geeks] freebsd and package tools

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Mar 12, 2009, at 19:25 , Michael-John Turner wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 06:07:55PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> This is an embedded system we ship to customers, and going to the  
>> latest
>> packages would likely fail because some of them no doubt depend on  
>> things
>> newer than our 7.0-pre system.
>
> That's the problem with using -current (or using a system based upon a
> snapshot) - it's a moving target. Sooner or later you're going to  
> reach a
> point at which project-provided binary packages are no longer  
> compatible
> with your system. Best solution then is to build your own packages  
> using
> the ports tree (which may or may not work for your particular  
> scenario).

If we were on release-7.0, how would it be different?

Wouldn't the latest ports still be incompatible and require things  
from 7.1?

One issue too is that we need the ability to rebuild a base machine in  
case we lost a development/base machine and/or lose backups.

That means being able to pick a specific ISO image and install  
FreeBSD, and then install the specific ports tree we've been using, in  
addition to our own custom code.

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.

But then I could be missing something obvious.

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

It would be nice if cvsup had some way of knowing which versions of  
the ports tree  your system could support, so it would refuse to  
upgrade if it would mean forcing a base OS upgrade too.



-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."