On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 07:26:24PM -0600, Michael Osburn wrote:
> While I fully realize that installing from ports is not the accepted
> process for anyone except for developers, I wish to start helping out
> in any way I can; though, being a low-skilled OpenBSD programmer
> tends to hurt more then help.
>
> I started looking at using my spare machine (it only plays music to
> the stereo and has a lot of unused cycles) to help test snapshots and
> new ports. After bringing the base system to current, I found it a
> major headache to update the ports from the initial 3.9 stable branch
> to current. The problem stemmed from trying to build updated ports
> and having to manually pkg_delete all of my previously installed
> software and rebuild from scratch. It seemed rather silly to me to
> manually tear my entire system down for updates when I could be
> better using the system to test the installed applications.
>
> Thinking about how a lot of developers use OpenBSD as their main
> system (and presuming that they are not mixing stable with current) I
> feel there must be a more efficient way of updating the installed
> packages/ports. It seems that this type of updating would be a
> tremendous time sink for those actually doing the hard work. Would
> anyone care to share their tips on keeping their own machines current
> without having to uninstall/reinstall every time they update?
Updated packages can always be found on the mirrors, under
/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/<myarch>.
While this always lags behind the ports tree a little, it's usually
sufficient; in rare cases (security problems?), you want to get a port
ASAP and will have to compile it yourself. This is the exception,
though.
Joachim
