I agree with you, graff, that this does happen.

I am always p-o'd by things that are in site_perl/5.8.6/blah instead of site_perl/blah, but that's an application of the philosophy of upgrading that does its best NOT to overwrite configurations. That has been The Berkeley Way from Day 1, but is it only FreeBSD ports that do this? The same philosophy applies to unpacking directories when porting, so that apache-1.3.36 is not overwritten by 1.3.37, for example. One could argue that modules are runtimes and therefore should be in common directories, but they're also source, and thus -- by the philosophy -- should not.

Yes, you do have to sweep the module directories up to the generic before going into production or do a manual port upgrade of each module, and, no, that's not mentioned except in The manpage of Hard Knocks. I'd rate the power of the ports collection and portupgrade system as far and away better than any other installation system on any *NIX, but it doesn't pretend to protect admins against the need to understand what's happening with each and every package used in production.

Of course, that's why the new boxes I mentioned get upgrades and testing before they go live. We never upgrade production boxes on the fly; some of ours are still running 4.10. I can't say we have never been bitten, and certainly I'm waaaay far short of the all-knowing guru I've made it sound like I am/we have, but that's why you build and test off-line.

FreeBSD is not meant to be the idiot's way to riches, but it sure _is_ the poor geek's toolbox for Internet success.

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