On Mon, Oct 04, 2004 at 04:03:19PM -0400, Radhika Sambamurti wrote:
|I am not sure what version of pkgsrc I was using, but it was quite old
|(older than Q2).
|
|I agree with you that the most grevious thing is that before you know
|it, in case of a failure, a lot of my packages were de-installed. It
|would be nice to see a small warning of the powers of make update or at
|least the consequences of running that command.

you may be interested in doing what I do - it's a variant of the bulk
build process as outlined in Packages.txt.

Basically, you nominate a directory to serve as the root directory of
a chroot environment (eg, /var/chroot/compile) and unpack at least
base.tgz, etc.tgz, compile.tgz and xbase.tgz into it (this isn't a 
definitive list - I'm working from memory here!)

When you want to make a set of packages, run

  chroot /var/chroot/compile

and you're then in your compile environment, which is nicely
self-enclosed

That way, you can do all your package compiles, testing, etc without
trashing your system packages ... once you're happy with what's in your
chroot environment, you can copy the binary packages you built into your
main system area and install them without fuss - it also means you then
don't need to install pkgsrc and the compiler into your main system
area on any of the machines you do this for, making them leaner.

I've found that this method is extremely useful for performing both
pkgsrc and kernel builds as it allows you to keep a working snapshot of
both kernel and pkgsrc sources around if you need to rebuild something
for your older-server-which-you-hadn't-gotten-around-to-upgrading and
pkgsrc and kernel sources have moved on significantly since then ...
the alternative is to upgrade lots of stuff and generally involves a
LOT more pain than maintaining 500MB or so of directory tree on the off
chance it may be necessary ... and if you need to you can always tar it
up and burn it to CD anyway.

Hope that helps,
Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Herbert                                    System Administrator
ph [990] 54881 rm 28-241                          School of GeoSciences