I have become quite confused on the status of package management on FreeBSD. I am coming to the conclusion that this is not necessarily an atypical state of mind. I have spent a fair bit of time searching for information on the web, and from that have also decided that a lot of what I have found is outdated, but it's very hard to separate "fresh" from "stale". I'd very much appreciate being pointed to the "Official" documentation for managing package updates, as well as how I should upgrade from 9.1.
I've been using ports, which has consumed a lot of time and resulted in a surprising amount of broken glass. At the moment a dozen or so packages are broken, most painfully for me editors/emacs (thankfully networking and ssh are ok). This appears to be a cascading problem from "lsof has been marked as IGNORE" (I think there may have been a second IGNORE'ed port). I tried to muddle through the port problems, and did multiple iterations of
I then learned that FreeBSD has a mechanism for binary package management. I can understand the power of compiling directly from source, but I would MUCH prefer to use pre-compiled binaries, and use ports as a fallback if problems crop up. But I have not been able to get pkg/pkgng to work. My last attempt was started from the handbook's pkgng intro, where I failed at:
Checking the FTP site finds that the subdirectory packages-9.1-release is missing. This appears to be... by design? I have skimmed the 2012 Compromise page, and understand that the loss of an SSH key and subsequent intrusion means that people were concerned about the integrity of the ports. It appears that this concern has extended to present day (at least for 9.1) and means that files are not available, at least in some places or through some mechanisms?
Practically, I'm at a loss as to how I should get out of the little hole I seem to be in. At the moment neither ports nor binary packages are working for me, and I'd really like something to allow upgrades. So most critically I'd really appreciate advice on how to get past my short-term problem (getting the system to a upgradable state). I suspect that this involves upgrading to 9.2, but I am not sure how to do that. Long term, advice on how to use binary packages would be greatly appreciated; I suspect that there's an official page for this, but as mentioned, I fear its a small amount of wheat buried in the chaff of all my web searches.
Thank you!
I've been using ports, which has consumed a lot of time and resulted in a surprising amount of broken glass. At the moment a dozen or so packages are broken, most painfully for me editors/emacs (thankfully networking and ssh are ok). This appears to be a cascading problem from "lsof has been marked as IGNORE" (I think there may have been a second IGNORE'ed port). I tried to muddle through the port problems, and did multiple iterations of
make deinstall
and make reinstall
. I edited some Makefiles to include FORCE_PKG_REGISTER= Yes. These fumbling approaches allowed some ports to install, but I still ended up with a significant number that would not, and I never felt that I was comprehending what I was doing.I then learned that FreeBSD has a mechanism for binary package management. I can understand the power of compiling directly from source, but I would MUCH prefer to use pre-compiled binaries, and use ports as a fallback if problems crop up. But I have not been able to get pkg/pkgng to work. My last attempt was started from the handbook's pkgng intro, where I failed at:
Code:
pkg_add -r pkg
Error: Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-9.1-release/Latest/pkg.tbz: File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access)
pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-9.1-release/Latest/pkg.tbz' by URL
Checking the FTP site finds that the subdirectory packages-9.1-release is missing. This appears to be... by design? I have skimmed the 2012 Compromise page, and understand that the loss of an SSH key and subsequent intrusion means that people were concerned about the integrity of the ports. It appears that this concern has extended to present day (at least for 9.1) and means that files are not available, at least in some places or through some mechanisms?
Practically, I'm at a loss as to how I should get out of the little hole I seem to be in. At the moment neither ports nor binary packages are working for me, and I'd really like something to allow upgrades. So most critically I'd really appreciate advice on how to get past my short-term problem (getting the system to a upgradable state). I suspect that this involves upgrading to 9.2, but I am not sure how to do that. Long term, advice on how to use binary packages would be greatly appreciated; I suspect that there's an official page for this, but as mentioned, I fear its a small amount of wheat buried in the chaff of all my web searches.
Thank you!
Code:
uname -a
FreeBSD citadel 9.1-RELEASE-p12 FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE-p12 #0: Tue Apr 29 22:02:25 UTC 2014 root@amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64