Pkgng to the rescue

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything in here so I’ll try to remember how things work…

A few weeks, like a lot of people, I ordered a RaspberryPi to use as a mediacenter. Unfortunately it still hasn’t arrived and I got tired of my good old xbox that’s starting to be quite limiting in terms of what I can ask it. Anyway, I had an old-ish desktop in the attic that I decided to use in place of the RPi in the meantime. The thing is, it was running FreeBSD 8.1-BETA1, which also was quite old. I could have simply reinstalled everything but: a) I didn’t have an install cd and b) I decided to give pkgng a proper try (as opposed to just running it in a vm).

First step: upgrading to 9.0-RELEASE. Pretty easy thanks to freebsd-update, I did have to go via 8.1-RELEASE because of some metadata integrity check failing. Didn’t add too long to the process, so I’m not complaining.

Second step: updating the ports tree with portsnap (my tool of choice) and installing ports-mgmt/pkg.

Last step (ok this one is fairly long and more complicated): point PACKAGESITE to pkgbeta.freebsd.org and force-upgrade all packages (pkg update && pkg upgrade -fy).

Tada!

Backtracking slightly, the last step didn’t go without any trouble, pkgng complained about ports having file conflicts. In some cases, ports had been merged/deleted (so the easy fix was to pkg delete them first). In other cases, we were going from a versioned port to another one (e.g. mysql50-client to mysql55-client) so the register origin for the package had to be changed with pkg set –o databases/mysql50–client:databases/mysql55–client. Finally pkg upgrade -fy wasn’t complaining anymore.

So that was a few days ago, yesterday a new package set was uploaded. Since I pointed PACKAGESITE to http://pkgbeta.freebsd.org/freebsd-9-i386/latest/, pkg update picked up on the new packageset and more packages were available for upgrade. pkg upgrade worked without a hitch but a couple of apps that I had installed via ports (and not yet available as packages) weren’t upgraded along with graphics/png, which caused x11/slim to look for a non-existent png library. Note that I only used pkg(ng), not portmaster or portupgrade which would have picked up on the update since PORTREVISION for x11/slim was bumped. I am told that preserving shared libraries might be added to pkgng v1.1.

Anyway, congratulations to bapt@ and everybody else working on this! There are still a few rough edges but it’s working pretty darn well already!