On Mon, 17 Mar 2014, Greg Troxel wrote:
But I stand by my comment that basically updating everything is good practice, and avoids lots of trouble.
Without meaning any impertinence, please allow me to respond. I would never gainsay your comment above, especially with its caveat "basically." I seem always to encounter trouble when I stray from my "basic" practice of working with *relatively* frequent "cvs up's" of the pkgsrc tree.
My impression has been that one of the virtues of the pkgsrc system is that one need not keep all packages up to date. In the bad old days of small drives and slow processors this was a decided plus. Right now lintpkgsrc shows I have approximately 120 packages out of date with the CVS tree. This makes sense (to me) since this currently-under-discussion install of NetBSD was first populated with userland packages from the collection 'pkgsrc-2013Q4'.
I have never understood these quarterly package releases, and never have been able to stay with one until the next appears. I always seem to need/want something that is in CVS but not elsewhere, and so eventually do a (eek!) 'rm -rf *' in /usr/pkgsrc and then a cvs co. This time around I once again returned to one of these releases hoping to have a different experience, but alas it was not to be.
Right now I don't think I am suffering all that much as a result of those 120 out-of-date packages residing on my Unix machine, which I hasten to add is a Micron full tower dual PPro-180mhz 256Mbyte ram sporting twin 9 gig SCSI hard drives. How long to update those 120 packages? I'd rather not think about it! But somehow I think the funders of pkgsrc wanted to take that burden from my shoulders. Perhaps, Dr. Troxel, you are one of them!
Best regards, -- Bob Bernstein
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