How to forcefully upgrade all your FreeBSD ports using portupgrade

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When moving from one major FreeBSD branch to another, you are almost compelled to upgrade all of your installed FreeBSD ports. If you move from the RELENG_7 branch to RELENG_8, as an example, the old pty interface is deprecated, and ports such as screen (sysutils/screen) must be recompiled and reinstalled to take advantage of the new pts interface.

As a precaution, you should first remove all traces of the GNU auto tools. They are only build tools and the presence of old versions may affect the upgrade process negatively.

cd /var/db/pkg
pkg_delete -i auto*

If you are using portupgrade (from ports-mgmt/portupgrade) to handle the upgrade, then you should first forcefully upgrade Berkeley DB 4.1 (databases/db41), Ruby 1.8 (lang/ruby18), and everything that depends on Berkeley DB 4.1 and Ruby 1.8. This will give you a fresh set of tools for upgrading the remaining ports.

Just to be sure, check and see what incarnation of Berkeley DB databases/ruby-bdb actually depends on.

less -S /var/db/pkg/ruby18-bdb-*/+CONTENTS

Look for lines similar to these.

@pkgdep db41-4.1.25_4
@comment DEPORIGIN:databases/db41

If, say databases/db42 is shown instead of databases/db41, then replace databases/db41 with databases/db42 in every command presented below.

This command takes care of upgrading the ports relevant to the portupgrade utility.

/usr/local/sbin/portupgrade -fprv databases/db41 lang/ruby18

Next, you should update and verify the integrity of the pkg and ports databases utilized by the portupgrade utility.

/usr/local/sbin/pkgdb -u
/usr/local/sbin/pkgdb -F
/usr/local/sbin/portsdb -u
/usr/local/sbin/portsdb -F

If, for some reason, pkgdb or portsdb complains about the internal structure of the pkg and/or ports databases, simply delete the database files and recreate them from scratch using these commands:

rm /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db
rm /usr/ports/INDEX-?.db
/usr/local/sbin/pkgdb -u
/usr/local/sbin/portsdb -u

Now, you must upgrade all installed ports. This command upgrades all your installed ports, including those ports upgraded by the previous command.

/usr/local/sbin/portupgrade -afprv

Should the upgrade process skip a few ports, it may be necessary to remove stray work directories from the /usr/ports hierarchy before attempting another run.

find /usr/ports -depth 3 -name work -type d -print > /usr/ports/work-directories.tmp
rm -Rf `cat /usr/ports/work-directories.tmp`
rm /usr/ports/work-directories.tmp

If you are curious about what portupgrade is planning to do, you might want to throw in the -n switch to do a dry run of the upgrade process.

/usr/local/sbin/portupgrade -nfprv databases/db41 lang/ruby18
/usr/local/sbin/portupgrade -nafprv

Remember to run portupgrade without the -n switch to actually accomplish the upgrade.