make continent

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jul 11), Jonathan said:
> Having been using FreeBSD for a fair few years now, I quite happily
> do a buildworld every now and then but one of the mysteries for me is
> how to rebuild parts of the OS in isolation.
> 
> My only interest in this is when a security update comes out and it
> might only affect a certain part of the source tree.
> 
> I appreciate that in the BSD model, the idea is that a widget can get
> changed and making world will allow the new features of that widget
> to permeate to all code, but is there any information on how to go
> into the various "continents" and build those on their own?

For most stuff, you can simply cd into /usr/src/usr.bin/programname, or
/usr/src/lib/libname, and run "make obj && make depend && make && make
install".  If you rebuild a library, though, it's up to you to make
sure that you also rebuild any statically-linked programs using that
library.  There may also be issues where buiding one program may
require another program to be updated (the texinfo stuff, for example,
or a new copy of sed or make).  The reason there's a "make world" is to
ensure that all these dependencies are taken care of.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com