Why userland , basesystem and Kernel are together?!

[Simon Barner]

Hi Vahric,

>     First thanks for your answer . Please correct me if I mis understand
> something .
> 
>  1)   You mean if I want to keep source up-to-date method and use make world
> process I must test it another test machine before apply it to the
> production server .

I think that Scott put this quite nicely. Of course, you will not have a
test machine for your desktop machine at home, but depending on the
importance of a particular machine you, as a responsible admin, will not
use untested patches/updates, ... To continue the home network example,
you will try a patch on your FreeBSD desktop first, before applying it to
your FreeBSD gateway, proxy or whatever that several other people
depend on.

>  2)     You said that FreeBSD was more than a kernel . What do you mean
> Could you explain little more or Do you know any documentation or whitepaper
> which explain mind of the FreeBSD operating System .

Have a look at
   http://www.freebsd.org/
and follow the links in the main text.

This might also interest you:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/explaining-bsd/

> 3)    I red small paragraf from http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/
> after your advise -FreeBSD Update is a system for automatically building,
> distributing, fetching, and applying binary security updates for FreeBSD.
> This makes it possible to easily track the FreeBSD security branches without
> the need for fetching the source tree and recompiling -
>     *** it seems really  good _! Soory but if binary update make all things
> easyer than soruce update mechanism Why Everybody advising source-update
> instead of freebsd-update ....

IMO, the reason is two-fold:

1. Using the source based method, you can tailor the system to your
   needs: You can build only those parts of the system you need
   (increasing security), use custom options, optimize for your CPU, ...
   
   If you are familiar with programming, you could also fix small issues
   on your own - although most people won't most likely do that.
   
2. Historically, FreeBSD is very source-centric. Not only the binary
   update-mechanism is rather young, but also FreeBSD started its life
   as a (source) patch set against 4.4BSD-Lite.
   
   If you browser the CVS repository, you will see, how carefully people
   document the changes to the source tree. In contrast to Linux, for
   example, you are able to reconstruct the history of every single
   FreeBSD feature.
   
   And this does not apply to FreeBSD's kernel only, but also to all the
   great pieces of software in the base system. If the responsible
   people of the FreeBSD team decide to add a new tool to the base
   system, they import it into the CVS repository and apply FreeBSD
   specify patches to it (which are, of course, fed back upstream). For
   example, FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE does not have the latest and greatest version
   of OpenSSH, but it came with a known-good version plus patches for
   the security holes.
   
If you have a look at all this, you will easily understand why there
aren't multiple FreeBSD distributions (like in the Linux world):
The FreeBSD Project provides more than a kernel - it also maintains
the base system and almost 10000 ported third-party applications (the
so-called ports collection).

Hope that answered your questions at least a bit. I'd suggest that you
browse the web site and have a look at the documentation (also a very
important part of the project) in order to get a better feeling for FreeBSD.

Simon
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