Posted by Jim at October 1st, 2004

There’s a tool in FreeBSD that allows a person to update every program running on the machine. This is a good thing in that it’s always nice to run the most recent version of any program.

Portupgrade makes it really easy. If you want to, you only have to type in “portupgrade” and all your applications will “magically” improve themselves.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work anyway. As anyone who uses computers knows, things don’t always go as planned when you upgrade. And today I decided to take a chance. I’ve always been tempted to run portupgrade in the setting where it not only updates all programs, but also updates all the programs that those programs depend upon (if they happen to be old).

This is not a good thing because I haven’t really had a need to make my system totally up to date since installation. Thus, a lot of programs have the potential to be old. And I ran portupgrade in a mode where it upgrades everything.

Hopefully the computer will still work tomorrow morning. If not, I suppose I can always reinstall the operating system.