smart update for pkgsrc

[Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost>]

Hi guys,

how do you update your packages, when using compiling them from source?

The way I am using since ages, is:

1) run lintpkgsrc, check the output
2) update first critical packages (e.g. sudo or shell) and then 
libraries by coing into its directory and doing "make update"
3) after a couple of updates, re-run lintpkgsrc and continue

this process works but is tedious. Often it gets interrupted that a 
certain package can't be insalled, usually it is an unclean workdir 
(even if make update cleans.. it happens). I remove it, reissue make 
update, it continues, but at the end I might have unreinstalled packages 
(which might explain the dirty workdirs).

Also, if I have to update two libraries which cause both a dependency on 
a larger tookit and/or application, I rebuild the whole tree twice. With 
monstrum applications like firefox or thunderbird (and now with gtk3 
even emacs) this is quite some pain!

On FreeBSD portupgrade -ay works better. On Gentoo with portage emerge 
does a very good job with dependencies. One can decide to update 
everything, but also for example "emerge -Dua library1, application1, 
library2" will show the dependency tree and rebuild everything only 
"once" as needed. and it fails quite rarely.

Thanks
  Riccardo