Help For upgrading Releng4.11 stable to 6.0 stable

[Ralf S. Engelschall]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2005, Bruce A. Mah wrote:

> If memory serves me right, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:
>
> > Directly jumping from 4 to 6 might work similar to the 4 to 5 procedure
> > but I've never tried this.
>
> No.  Source-upgrading to 6.X can only be done from 5.3-RELEASE (or newer
> RELENG_5).  So somebody trying to do a source upgrade from 4.X needs to
> do it in two steps.

Yes, but if you look at my 4 to 5 upgrade procedure in detail you will
see that it isn't just a straight-forward "build from source" approach.
It actually uses a rather strange but necessary "overwrite the running
system with new binaries and then rebuild from source" approach. And I'm
still not seeing why this wouldn't work for a direct 4 to 6 upgrade.

This upgrade approach is far away from being pretty and elegant, of
course. But it allows one to fully remotely upgrade a FreeBSD box
without access to the console and single user mode (which was the hard
problem I had to circumvent). And I still think it could be adapted for
a direct 4 to 6 jump, although I cannot recommend doing this approach if
it can be avoided.

> But in general for such a "large" upgrade I'd strongly urge backing up
> all data, wiping the disk(s), and reinstalling + restoring.  (For what
> it's worth, I specifically recommended this in the 5.X Early Adopters
> Guide.)

Sure, at least if someone wants UFS2 this is the only possibility at all
AFAIK...

--
rse at FreeBSD.org                        Ralf S. Engelschall
FreeBSD.org/~rse                       rse at engelschall.com
FreeBSD committer                      www.engelschall.com