Patch vs. Upgrade

David Kirchner dpk at dpk.net
Wed Oct 12 10:27:24 PDT 2005


On 10/12/05, Andrew P. <infofarmer at gmail.com> wrote:
> If things are not too tight on yout hard drive,
> consider the cvsup way. It's very easy - and
> very clearly described in the handbook.

I've seen many people say this, but I suspect they haven't tried
looking for information on patching using cvsup in the handbook. It's
not easy to find. I think we're doing a disservice to the community
directing people there without pointing them to a specific page (it is
a 4MB document).

The notes on using cvsup to keep your system up to date are under the
section header "Cutting Edge". I dunno about you, but when it comes to
security patchse, I'd like to see them as easy as possible, not
something as elite as that. Maybe that's just a poor choice of a
title, though.

The only specifically correct information -- using 'standard-supfile'
-- appears under the header "Using FreeBSD-CURRENT", a section most
newbies certainly ought to avoid unless they want to run bleeding-edge
may-not-compile-at-all code.

In any case, a direct link to the information on how to keep your
system up to date is available here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html#AEN27683

You only need to read paragraph 2a -- the rest has to do with -CURRENT
and other crufty methods of getting source. Then you can skip to:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/synching.html

and read that and the next page. That should be enough to get you
going with the latest -RELEASE-pNN patch level.


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