[nycbug-talk] upgrading perl and all deps (FreeBSD)

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi all,

Just curious what folks here do that have perl installed from ports and 
have a large number of dependencies...  A good example would be something 
like SpamAssassin (have a look at it with 'pkg_tree -v 
p5-Mail-SpamAssassin').

If you make the mistake of just running portupgrade on perl, you end up 
with quite a mess - portupgrade will fix up the dependencies in the pkg 
db, but it will basically break all your modules since the location of the 
modules changes with each version of perl.  You would then have to 
"portupgrade -f p5-*" to rebuild/uninstall/reinstall everything.

Running "portupgrade -rf perl-5.8.x" seems to generally work well.

But is there any better way I'm missing?  The main drawback here is that 
if you don't have a dedicated build host, you have perl unavailable for a 
pretty sizable length of time...

Thanks,

Charles