8.2/7.4-RELEASEs Announced...

John Baldwin jhb at freebsd.org
Fri Feb 25 20:02:19 UTC 2011


On Friday, February 25, 2011 1:00:19 pm jhelfman at e-e.com wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 02:42:25PM +0100, Marco van Tol wrote:
> >>
> >> Read up on the mergemaster manual for options "-F" and "-i" :-)
> > 
> >   freebsd-update does not use mergemaster, though probably it should.
> 
> My understanding is that freebsd-update was introduced prior to releases 
> being branched, so this issue surfaced at that time. The patch I believe 
> would be a fix to the freebsd-update client to better handle the tag. I
> can't see mergemaster as being an easier solution, as the actual binary
> would need to be verified against a known good index that would exist on the
> update server.

No, release branches long pre-date freebsd-update.  However, before we 
switched to svn for source, new branches did not bump all the $FreeBSD$ tags.  
That is a side effect of the way that the SVN -> CVS exporter works (and 
arguably a bug).

BTW, I did design etcupdate to support this sort of use case (you can build a
tarball from a given release tree and use that as the basis for comparisons
assuming you were bootstrapped to use etcupdate).  Currently freebsd-update
doesn't use etcupdate and the author doesn't have any interest in changing it
to do so.

At some point if I have some time to hack on freebsd-update to be more useful
for modified versions of FreeBSD (e.g. building snaps from tags in an SVN
repository instead of a directory of patches against a CVS checkout), I will
probably hack it to support using etcupdate to manage /etc updates as well.

(etcupdate uses something akin to 'svn up' to update files in /etc, so things
like $FreeBSD$ changes just auto-update assuming they don't result in merge
conficts.)

-- 
John Baldwin


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