Staying up to date - easy way?

[Alex de Kruijff]

On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 04:38:52PM -0700, Gary Singleton wrote:
> Hi everbody, I'm new to FreeBSD and coming back after a long time away
> from UNIX like OSs in the first place.  I decided to try out FreeBSD
> because it seems to be a better controlled product than most of the
> Linux stuff out there and what I'd really want FreeBSD for is servers
> anyway, no X or anything like that.
> 
I'm gonna give you a point of view of someone who likes to compile
code, essacialy for server. They have one advange over binairy updates.
They give you control about how to build them. Cutting support for the
i386 process makes the apps go faster. A binairy, on the otherhand, is
faster installed.

> Here's my question.  Is there a simple way to stay up to date with
> FreeBSD?  The install was great!  But the whole CVSup, rebuild thing
> seems a little much to do for just security updates.  Is it just a huge
> thing the first time you do it and get smaller / faster after that or
> am I just completely missing something else.  Could I make a refuse
> file and refuse everything except what I need?  Am I clueless?
> 
There usaly are binairies updates when a security update is repored 
comes availble. Usaly the website despribes a way to install them. 
Make sure that you are on the rigth mailinglists. (www.freebsd.org; i 
can't give you the exact link, since i am in a somewhat limet 
enverioment right now. 

The proces you desribe takes a couple of hours and is compicated to 
do the first time. After that it easy. The /etc/make.conf file allow
you control over the build process. This includes some controle about
what not to build.

A build proces normaly looks like this:
mergemaster -p
make buildworld; make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC

This all can run in the background. After that, and there are no 
errors, you can get the machine in single user mode and install it with:
make installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC
check for errors
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot

It looks more compicated than it is, realy. I usaly run the build pard
on the backgound with the commands:
idprio 30 make buildworld; idprio 30 make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC &

This effectivly makes it give preference to all other processes as much
as posible. I also written a script for my self to make this process 
easier for my self. I included it as an atachement. Its smart not to use
this for the first time you build the world in order to get a feeling 
for the proces.

> I always used Debian's apt-get update / upgrade stuff before and it was
> a really simple process.  I don't doubt that FreeBSD is very powerful
> but I like to be up to date with patches and stuff but don't want to
> rebuild everything every time.

The apt-get system realy is nice. On FreeBSD there is a port availble 
called portupgrade that allows you to update you ports/packages. Only
the last time it wasn't able to update packages if you had security
updates because it didn't parse a system varible the right way.

Again i usaly compile and use an alias set in the /root/.cshrc for that:
alias pi idprio 30 portinstall (for installing)
alias pu idprio 30 portupgrade (for upgrading)
alias pv portversion | grep -v \= (for commandline checking)

> 
> Thanks in advance for advising this newbie and I hope I didn't say
> anything offensive, overall I'm falling in love with FreeBSD but this
> one issue bothers me.
> 
There's nothing wrong with liking FreeBSD ;)

Alex