list patches

[Matthew Seaman]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 04:20:57PM +0200, Yaraghchi, Stephan wrote:

> I'm wondering if there's an easy way to list all
> the patches already applied to a FreeBSD box.

Err -- no.  FreeBSD doesn't really work that way.  You sound as if
you're used to, say, Solaris where there is a system of
vendor-produced binary patches and the scripting interface to manage
them.  While there is http://www.daemonology.net/ there is no official
FreeBSD project binary patch system at the moment.

FreeBSD does things differently.  The primary means of getting updates
to the system is to pull down updates to the source code and
recompile.  There are several ways of doing that, all described in the
Handbook:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors.html
(especially the section on CVSup which is what most people would use.)

In general then the way you'ld characterise the state of the system is
to note the time at which you last synchronised your sources against
the FreeBSD CVS repository, and which CVS tag you used.  There are
certain cases which can be described in a more-or-less shortcut
manner: those are (a) using one of the releases installed straight
from CD, which is refered to as eg. 5.2.1-RELEASE or (b) tracking one
of the -RELEASE CVS branches, eg.  RELENG_5_2 -- in this case every
time a patch is applied the system version as returned by 'uname -r'
will indicate a "patch level" eg. 5.2.1-RELEASE-p4.  However, you can
manually apply the same patches (as directed in the accompanying
security advisory) and recompile just the affected part of the system.
This gets your system to exactly the same state as tracking the
release branch, except that the various version numbers don't get
updated.

That doesn't count any other sort of ad-hoc patches or local
customizations which may have been applied.  Neither does it deal with
3rd party software (but see pkg_info(1) for how to deal with that).

In short, the most effective way to learn everything you need to know
about the state of a FreeBSD box is to ask the person doing the system
administration.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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