Making Sure that Your Ports Tree Is Up to Date

Software changes. There are more than 4,000 ports in the collection, and each one of them is undergoing development (some at much faster rates than others). A fact of system administration is that you can't install or upgrade software fast enough to keep up with the rate of development. The best you can hope to do is keep your ports collection up to date, and use the built-in tools, such as pkg_version, to keep track of what needs to be upgraded.

To keep your ports synchronized, the best tool for the job is CVSup. We will cover CVSup in detail in Chapter 18, “Keeping Up to Date with FreeBSD,” but it's a necessary part of working efficiently with ports, so we'll go through how to use it in its simplest ...

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