keeping my freebsd secure... THANX

Charles Ulrich charles at idealso.com
Sat Jun 19 19:21:45 GMT 2004


Ladislav Bodnar said:
> In all honesty, I don't feel confident about upgrading an entire system
> by compiling from sources. Maybe it's because I've been bitten by
> upgrade problems on Gentoo, but also because, from whatever little
> experience I have with FreeBSD, compiling from sources can fail on
> FreeBSD too.

Yes, building from sources on FreeBSD can fail, but if you're tracking
-STABLE, it's a fairly unlikely occurance. And much more unlikely if you're
tracking updates to a specific release which is what I typically do for
production machines.

I've only been using FreeBSD for about 2 years now, but I haven't yet run
across a problem with source upgrades that wasn't my fault. The alert FreeBSD
developers and the very structure of the development process itself both
minimize the chance of something bad happening to end-users during an upgrade.

In a nutshell: you can count on FreeBSD to build cleanly from sources 99.999%
of the time as long as you're doing everything right.

Charles Ulrich


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