best way to upgrade packages

[TCE]

I am a new FreeBsd user, and been using linux for about 3 years. I was wondering what is the best way to upgrade all packages. Read alot of howtos, but there is so many different ways I start to get confused

 

[sixtydoses]

Guess the most popular tools are portupgrade and portmaster.

This may provide you with a little hint of those 2 tools, if not much http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=6078

 

[DutchDaemon]

Be aware of the difference between ports and packages. If you have a package-only system (pretty rare around here), use the script in the sysutils/bsdadminscripts port/package [sic].

 

[TCE]

Thank you for your help. I was using portupgrade already, but was just making sure it was the best option.

 

[DutchDaemon]

You'll find that a lot of people here will say that about portmaster, actually

 

[SageRaven]

You'll find that a lot of people here will say that about portmaster, actually

While that may be true for day-to-day port management, I've found portmaster to be a major pain when updating all (or a large portion) of one's ports. At least portupgrade will continue to chug along if a build fails, whereas portmaster will gleefully come to a halt at the first sign of trouble (often, immediately after you've left the console, expecting your rebuild to be working for the next couple of hours unattended).

Of course, I may just be unaware of a magic flag that tells portmaster to ignore errors.

 

[TCE]

Thank you for your suggestions. I will give both a try.

 

[fronclynne]

While that may be true for day-to-day port management, I've found portmaster to be a major pain when updating all (or a large portion) of one's ports. At least portupgrade will continue to chug along if a build fails, whereas portmaster will gleefully come to a halt at the first sign of trouble (often, immediately after you've left the console, expecting your rebuild to be working for the next couple of hours unattended).

Of course, I may just be unaware of a magic flag that tells portmaster to ignore errors.

I haven't found one for that; but the one that bugs me is that there seems to be no portmaster equivalent to # portupgrade -fR foo-8.6.7 which can be quite useful in the case of one misbehaving port.

 

[atomicplayboy]

# portmaster -f foo-8.6.7 will recursively rebuild all dependencies of foo-8.6.7. # portmaster -r foo-8.6.7 will recursively rebuild all ports depending on foo-8.6.7. Without any flags, portmaster will always rebuild the port you specify after upgrading any dependencies that are out of date. It's a little different from how portupgrade works, but the results are the same.