Source level upgrade from 4.9 to CURRENT..

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Thomas Backman <serenity at exscape.org>wrote:

> On Sep 15, 2009, at 7:36 PM, Rom Albuquerque wrote:I have a FreeBSD
> 4.9-RELEASE system which I want to upgrade to 7.X
>


> from the source level. Had a bunch of problems installing 7.1-RELEASE from
>> the CD distribution I got from freebsdmall.com. Several problems that
>> could not mount the CD at the time of installation causing sysinstall
>> to halt. So, 4.9 is installed and working, is there a source level
>> backward compatibility issue between 7.x and anything older than 6.0 ?
>> In other words, upgrading from the sources with such an old
>> distribution is a doable task ?
>>
>
Wow... project time.  Generally, I've done this type of thing by doing
something like 4.9->5.0->5.x->6.0->6.x->7.0->7.x

Why?  Generally updating from Y.X to Y+1.0 is something that has been done
many times.  Then Y.0 -> Y.X is also straightforward.  The fact that I don't
go from Y.0 to Y+1.0 is just superstition.  The Y.0 rev is very often out of
maintenance before y+1.0 is released.  Of course, if the hardware hasn't
been updated since 4.9, then you're probably going to have buildworld times
in the 6 to 8 hours.  Oi.

If you get to the minimum support level of freebsd-update, the remaining
upgrades might be faster through freebsd-update.

... although I've found version upgrades tedious through freebsd-update.  It
seems to want to manually merge every text file that has a CVS string
change.

... it might be good logic to not require a manual merge if the lines that
change begin with '#'