FreeBSD upgrades, nothing is changed, out of real world

The latest roundup of ports upgrades is definitely crazy: a very lot of updated packages need a COMPLETE rebuild of all of his dependencies (-r swtiches in poor bulding tools), and this honest do not make sense.

It means: every single user using FreeBSD for production use and not as an alternative to play Angry Birds (read loose time), will need hours and hours of build time if he want to reasonably update his system. And this is simply not acceptable and even do not make sense.

Personally, considering nothing is moving, I migrated many of my machines under free Solaris 11 and I'm very happy about the move. I moved the FreeBSD homes after installing the OS, like two hours and the system was totally fine and running and updated.

Acting like this, FreeBSD put itself in a ghetto. Actually the upgrade system is totally out of the real world. I will still use it for some appliances, then it is no more the first choice for me and my customers considering now Oracle Solaris 11 is free and binary updates are dispatched when needed like in any rolling release and they are very easy and fast to install like in any modern OS should be.

Bye bye again FreeBSD, it never was that good.
 
piggy said:
I will still use it for some appliances, then it is no more the first choice for me and my customers considering now Oracle Solaris 11 is free and binary updates are dispatched when needed like in any rolling release and they are very easy and fast to install like in any modern OS should be.

What are you smokin?
 
It's called natural selection.

I think he is a linux user pulling our legs here. I mean nobody can join this forum May 2010 and not figure this out yet.
 
You don't need to upgrade ports unless you need to, right?

For example, just install binary packages that come together with every FreeBSD RELEASE (I bet there are at least one RELEASE per year). By doing this, your ports (packages) are not more than one year old, and you can have your system relatively updated.

If you want every newest version of ports and packages, it's same in other OSes. Often the newest versions are not offered in binary packages and you have to compile them yourself, and you might find some conflicts with other packages and in this case you have to compile other packages too.
 
bbzz said:
It's called natural selection.

I think he is a linux user pulling our legs here. I mean nobody can join this forum May 2010 and not figure this out yet.

He has claimed to be a FreeBSD user since 1994. Now he thinks that Oracle Solaris is free :beergrin
 
piggy said:
The latest roundup of ports upgrades is definitely crazy: a very lot of updated packages need a COMPLETE rebuild of all of his dependencies (-r swtiches in poor bulding tools), and this honest do not make sense.

What kind of update are you talking about?
I usually update only those ports that have security updates (that is, the output of ports-mgmt/portaudit), and I do this on a daily basis so the whole thing is not much time-consuming (except for www/firefox: I have to admit that I'm getting tired of having to recompile this monster every few days - but it's not FreeBSD's fault)

piggy said:
will need hours and hours of build time if he want to reasonably update his system. And this is simply not acceptable and even do not make sense.
If you want your system to be constantly bleeding-edge, this is the price to pay, so the only things you have to accept are the consequences of your choices.
Every day there are many updates in the ports tree, and if you have many ports installed then you have to recompile a lot of stuff. This makes perfect sense to me.
If you don't need any new special feature from one of your installed applications then there is no point to update always to the latest version of every piece of software. Just apply the (base|ports) security update and you are done.

Ever considered to use packages?

piggy said:
Acting like this, FreeBSD put itself in a ghetto.
Maybe, but I feel very confortable in this ghetto.

piggy said:
Actually the upgrade system is totally out of the real world.
This is highly subjective. What is your conception or "real world"?
If you want to push a single button to update the whole system (base + apps) then the ports system is obviously the wrong way, so it's not port system's fault, but it's yours because you are using the wrong tool.
By using the ports collection to install/upgrade your applications you have a high level of flexibility, at the cost af an increased complexity. More control, more complexity.

However, I'm not here to tell you what is best for you. I hope you will find comfortable with Solaris - well, at least you don't have switched to Linux...
 
For example, just install binary packages that come together with every FreeBSD RELEASE (I bet there are at least one RELEASE per year). By doing this, your ports (packages) are not more than one year old, and you can have your system relatively updated.

The OP is a simple troll, but let's keep it straight - FreeBSD's binary package management is inferior to some Linux counterparts. For instance Perl's binary package is compiled without threading. And I clearly remember pulling a Perl-based package with $ pkg_add -r something
only to be left with a line saying "you need threaded perl" after I ran that program. That's not nice, especially since installation went without any warning or error. And it doesn't happen with Yum or Apt. For every Apache port config option on FreeBSD, Yum/Apt stuff has a separate binary package that can be marked as a dependency for other package.
 
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