# binary package maintenance tool



## kamikaze (May 1, 2009)

The port sysutils/bsdadminscripts has just been updated to version 6.0, which features pkg_upgrade, a binary only package maintenance tool.
It makes no use of the ports tree, so unlike other build oriented tools, you do not need a copy of the ports tree to keep your packages up to date.
It only requires an INDEX file from pointyhead or your personal Tinderbox.

Thanks go to Markus SchÃ¶pke and his employer http://www.webstyle.ch (FreeBSD hosting) for extensive feedback, testing and providing me with hardware to perform my own tests.

Also featuring this release is UMA, a simple package/ports meta data maintenance and locking script, to provide consistency and locking for the coexistence of several package maintenance tools. The port ports-mgmt/kports-qt4 will make use of UMA in future versions.

pkg_upgrade will, among other things, support parallel background downloading from several mirrors with the next version. This has already been implemented, but has not yet received sufficient testing to make it into this release.

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## kamikaze (May 7, 2009)

The next version with parallel background downloading is available, now. With the right selection of mirrors, package downloads can be much faster than with pkg_add -r.


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## kujirasan (May 9, 2009)

can you install any binary by the port(as you know you need dependency) , I never have used BSD, so just asking to find out


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## kamikaze (May 9, 2009)

I'm afraid I do not understand the question.

At the moment 18236 binary packages are available for FreeBSD 7-stable/amd64.

Some ports cannot be offered as packages, because of licensing restrictions.


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## lme@ (May 9, 2009)

What can speedup the downloads even more is changing the protocol from ftp to http.


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## kamikaze (May 9, 2009)

What makes you say that http is faster than ftp? This doesn't seem very likely to me.


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## lme@ (May 9, 2009)

For me pkg_add -r seems to be faster when I set PACKAGEROOT to a http site than to an ftp site.


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