too late to change to security branch?

[Bill Stwalley]

On 9/30/07, Rakhesh Sasidharan <rakhesh at rakhesh.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Bill!
>
> > I have servers running 6.1 and 6.2.  I use freebsd-update in cron jobs
> to
> > install binary security update to the base system, and use
> cvsup/portupgrade
> > in cron jobs to install port updates.  By default, cvsup uses CURRENT
> > branch.
>
> The ports system doesn't have any branches. The same tree is used between
> all the different FreeBSD branches so you can't just track security
> updates only. You track it using portupgrade/ cvsup.
>
> The base system has many branches. In your case, you seem to be following
> the security branches for 6.1 and 6.2 using freebsd-update.
>
> > I am tired of some updates breaking something unnecessarily, and am
> thinking
> > of changing to SECURITY branch in cvsup.  Is that possible?  Some of my
> > ports are already locally compiled with customized options.
>
> Maybe you can provide more info on what's breaking?
>
> I use FreeBSD for a couple of headless machines. No X and other stuff, but
> I haven't had any breakages so far. *touchwood* Do go though the UPDATING
> file to check out any gotchas before updating.
>
> HTH,
>
>
>                                 - Rakhesh
>                                  http://rakhesh.net/
>

I'm grateful to all your clarifications, as I feel this operation system is
really supported with care.

Our uw-imap was broken recently for a few days as people could not login, so
I had to switch to dovecot.  Nothing was mentioned in the UPDATING file,
although there was indeed a big update of uw-imap.  I only got relieved
after finding
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2007-October/044051.htmlposted
a couple days later.

Things similar to this, although to less extent, did happen once a couple
months, sometimes the "postfix" and other startup scripts in
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/ will be renamed to "postfix.sh" or vice verser by port
upgrade, that broke my other scripts.

As everyone appears to suggest against updating ports in cron job and
suggest reading UPDATING instead and then updating by hand, I'm really
curious: Is it practical to do that when you manage a dozen servers?  I
imagine doing that alone would be a substantial job.  However crontab
updated ports do take down services from time to time.

Best, Bill