Adventures in maintaining FreeBSD

I stole a little bit of bed-time to look into the problem from earlier today... I figured I may as well upgrade Gnome, since I'm not even sure what version I am running. If portupgrade is not suitable for upgrading Gnome, I may be a year behind. I should probably make sure Gnome is up-to-date to help ensure that it functions properly, especially since the rest of the system [as far as I know] has been rebulit...

gnome_upgrade.sh reported:

"Not enough space in /var/tmp to log the upgrade. Please set the MC_TMPDIR variable to a location that has at least 200 MB of free space, then restart the upgrade."

I had an annoying time getting over this issue: I always forget how to set [environment] variables, because the different shell interpreters (such as sh, csh, tcsh, and bash) can have slightly varying methods of doing so. Do you use `set' and `export', or `setenv', and then do you assign a value to variable name by putting an equal-sign (=) or a space ( ) between them? Those several common possibilities offer enough permutations to prevent one from guessing the correct syntax. I checked /etc/passwd to recall what shell interpreter my root account uses: csh. Somewhere on the web I found the syntax information I needed to produce the correct command:

setenv MC_TMPDIR /tmp

I now have gnome_upgrade.sh running "The Big Update". It says will take a LONG time, and suggests that if I've been planning a day trip, now would be a great time to take it. I think it's a little late for a day trip. I hope going to sleep for the night will be good enough...