3 Questions regarding Binary Package Management

I have a fresh, minimal install of FreeBSD 8.2 i386 and it looks like the applications I would like to run are in stable as opposed to release (libreoffice, firefox 4).

1. If I set PACKAGESITE to ****/packages-8-stable/Latest/ do I also need an 8-stable base system?

2. Browsing the forums I found mention of 'bxpkg' in ports. Is it also in the binary package respositories - I just found the bxpkg package in the ftp site

3. Is stable updated daily or is it more like OpenBSD current with periodic updates - I want to avoid getting caught between python updates.
 
1... I'd ncftp to packages-8-stable/www, for instance, to get the latest available, for instance, seamonkey(2) browser... as to Q#3, all are updated as license and hardware resources allow. Maybe seek other posts with long explanations of which there are many.
 
1) Usually you don't need to run -stable to use the -stable packages. There can be slight differences between a -STABLE and -RELEASE which could make packages build for -STABLE fail on a -RELEASE but that doesn't happen too often.

2) bxpkg is a GUI frontend to manage packages

3) -STABLE is a continuously moving target. It also has nothing to do with python or any other port. The base OS and the ports system are two separate entities.
 
Thanks to the above posters I built an OpenBox with libreoffice and firefox4. There were some minor issues with intels cpu speed stepping that where solved by advice elsewhere in the forum.

Looking down the road, I would like to keep the system up-to-date and do not necessarily need a GUI based front end to manage packages. I was hoping for something simple like openbsd's [cmd=]pkg_add -ui[/cmd] I understand that [cmd=]portupgrade -PP[/cmd] will accomplish this. In practice does [cmd=]portupgrade -PP[/cmd] leave one with a working desktop or from a reliability standpoint would it be better to go with bxpkg?

It looks like it should be [cmd=]portmaster -PP[/cmd] as pointed out in the next post.
 
Today, I've run multiple instances of
Code:
portmaster -d -B -i
(saving lots of time not updating gcc45, for example, but in the past I've used -PP with that to use packages-only IIRC. You might try that, you can tack on multiple package names to the one command if the syntax is right. (See other posts, search "portmaster" here and/or its man-page...)
 
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