INN users beware of ino_t change FreeBSD 11 to 12

[Adam Weinberger]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 12:05 PM Christian Weisgerber
<naddy at mips.inka.de> wrote:
>
> Adam Weinberger:
>
> > > User of INN (news/inn) should be aware of an issue when upgrading
> > > from FreeBSD 11 to 12 with an existing news spool.
> >
> > Thanks for this! Can you please add this to /usr/ports/UPDATING?
>
> I can do that.  Is UPDATING the right place?  I also considered
> pkg-message, but if you install lots of packages, like I did,
> important notices get lost in all the spam about lack of maintainer
> etc.

Truly, important notices are best in both. UPDATING is the canonical
references, but pkg-based users don't generally have that file present.
And you're absolutely right, pkg-message fatigue is a big problem, and
it probably would be beneficial if we do a sweep for superfluous
pkg-message content.

> Here's what I have for UPDATING.  I picked the 12.0 release date
> as date.  The sample command is very convoluted, but the port can
> be built with different layouts and if you execute su -fm as root,
> you'll get csh.
>
> --------------------
> 20181211:
>   AFFECTS: users of news/inn when upgrading to FreeBSD 12
>   AUTHOR: naddy at FreeBSD.org
>
>   When upgrading from FreeBSD 11 to 12, a change in the size of the
>   ino_t type causes a binary incompatibility in the overview database
>   if the default tradindexed format is used.
>
>   After upgrading the inn package, remove the overview/group.index
>   file and regenerate the history and overview database with
>   makehistory(8) before starting innd.
>
>   # echo '. /usr/local/news/lib/innshellvars && \
>         rm -f $OVERVIEWDIR/group.index && \
>         $NEWSBIN/makehistory -O -s `wc -l <$HISTORY`' | \
>         su -fm news -c '/bin/sh -s'

Convoluted isn't a problem as long as people can c&p it! Will inn
users know what their $OVERVIEWDIR and $NEWSBIN are? If
not you might say where they are by default.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
https://www.adamw.org