Recommended way of staying up to date?

I'm using portupgrade, portaudit and csup, althought I've been considering both portsnap and portmanager since I'm not just happy with portupgrade. Portupgrade feels utterly slow, but I'm not sure if any of the alternatives are any faster or better.

Looking forward to the day FreeBSD comes with a nice application in the base for updating ports :)
 
marius said:
Portupgrade feels utterly slow, but I'm not sure if any of the alternatives are any faster or better.
Click to expand...

There's no real way to speed up the process. Some languages are faster then others, but the build process is the primary factor for slowdowns.
However, making things better then portupgrade is relatively easy, as the power features have a way of screwing things up beyond repair. Don't take my word for it, search mailing list archives.
 
Portupgrade uses LOTS of memory. Especially on machines with only 512MB RAM other tools like portmaster are faster, because of all the overhead portupgrade has.

I originally switched to portmaster, because portupgrade was unbearable on a machine with 256MB RAM. Portmaster was a real improvement there.
 
I have this alias for updating my system in ~/.profile:
Code: 
alias sysupdate="portsnap fetch&&portsnap update&&cvsup /etc/cvsup.conf&&portupgrade -arn&&portsearch -vu"

So far I haven't come across anything easier.
 
ArtemD said:
I have this alias for updating my system in ~/.profile:
Code: 
alias sysupdate="portsnap fetch&&portsnap update&&cvsup /etc/cvsup.conf&&portupgrade -arn&&portsearch -vu"

So far I haven't come across anything easier.
Click to expand...

sysupdate isn't likely to be something you do thousands times a day, so putting the same code in a shell script seems to be a more logical thing to do, as it wouldn't use your shell interpreter's precious bytes of memory waiting to be run like an alias would.
 
kamikaze said:
Portupgrade uses LOTS of memory. Especially on machines with only 512MB RAM other tools like portmaster are faster, because of all the overhead portupgrade has.

I originally switched to portmaster, because portupgrade was unbearable on a machine with 256MB RAM. Portmaster was a real improvement there.
Click to expand...

Machines with 256MB RAM were state of the art in the previous millennium. Machines with that low memory, I wouldn't run a desktop on (or maybe donate it to my parents) and I'd do binary upgrades using the tools in the base system.
Still, 5 minutes start up time is only a perception of slowness on a 2 day build of open-office, for which portupgrade, portmaster or whichever tool is asleep the entire time.
I do believe portmaster is faster, but the gains are minimal for large upgrades, plus it does better on the perception part: portupgrade does a lot of things during start up in silence, which makes you think it's slow.
Also, any speed gains from portmaster are negated when a core library is upgraded (gettext, libxml, libiconv, take your pick), because portmaster will rebuild all dependenants, where portupgrade will do the smart thing and change the +CONTENTS files in /var/db/pkg.
Of course, this smartness is the cause of many tears on various mailing lists.
 
rihad said:
sysupdate isn't likely to be something you do thousands times a day, so putting the same code in a shell script seems to be a more logical thing to do, as it wouldn't use your shell interpreter's precious bytes of memory waiting to be run like an alias would.
Click to expand...

Thank for your suggestion. Your point is valid, but I have 4GB of ram and I doubt it creates a lot of overhead.
 
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