Upgrading frenzy

It's no secret, not that the stars are falling from the sky, but that updating your freeBSD box is a quasi trivial matter thanks to the fantastic port system and the non the less fantastic portupgrade command (ahhh portupgrade portupgrade, at least as good as man man, one of my favourite commands!!!).

But what to upgrade is another issue...
Fortunately the port and package systems provide us with nice tools for that. Especially pkg_version which gives us indications on if ports are older, newer or at the same "age" that the one on the root tree... Provided you update your tree dutifully with a good round of cvsup. You do that before trying to upgrade, don't you? It would be like not checking if you have gained 10 Kilos before going and buying a new pair of trousers...

The problem is that there is typically way to much ports and that way too much of them are in no need of upgrading... Once you played a little with pkg_version you know how to communicate with it, or more accurately how it communicates with you, meaning spiting out a > or a < a =" depending" style="font-style: italic;">pkg_version -v | grep \< | less and that should do it, allowing you to browse through the list of things that may need a good kick in the basement... (the \ before the < is to prevent the shell to interpret it as a feeding of file, of course...)

As I am approximately as lazy as longwei I am working on a script to compare for me the version numbers and tell me what *really* needs to be upgraded, but my coding/scripting is going down the drain at the moment due to a lack of free time (or an excess of activities, about the same in the end).

Don't forget to portugrade portugrade, heh!?