FreeBSD Update is the binary update solution [Re: HEADS UP: Release schedule for 2006]

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2005 07:47, Jo Rhett wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 06:19:25PM -0700, Scott Long wrote:
> > FreeBSD Update was written by, and is continuously maintained by the
> > actual FreeBSD Security Officer.  It's as official as it gets.  If
> > the only barrier to acceptance is that it's not distributed from the
> > FreeBSD.org domain, then a) that's a silly argument, and b) it's easily
> > solvable so long as Colin agrees.
>
> But FreeBSD Update suffers from all of the same limitations that I've been
> describing because of lack of integration with the Core OS.
>
> 1. modified kernels are foobar
>   ..yet are practically mandatory on production systems
>
> 2. modified sources are foobar
>   ..yet many common production situations require source compilation
> options

How do you expect these two to be handled in a binary upgrade?
I can't see how it's possible..

I don't think integrating it with the core OS (whatever that means) will 
magically fix this.

> 3. FreeBSD Update can't handle updates of jails and other situations that
> package systems deal with just fine.

Not having run jails I am not very qualified to comment, however, I don't see 
why you can't just run freebsd update inside your jail(s). If you mean that 
it would be good if you could automatically upgrade a large number of jails 
and rebuild link farms etc etc.. well sure that isn't supported, but it is a 
very difficult problem to solve (I believe).

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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