freebsd-update problems

Aristedes Maniatis ari at ish.com.au
Sun Jan 8 00:26:10 UTC 2012


On 7/01/12 9:17 PM, Gianni Vialetto wrote:
> 2012/1/7 Aristedes Maniatis<ari at ish.com.au>:
>> [...]
>> 1. I am clearly running 8.2-p5, but the final message says "no updates
>> needed". That's clearly not correct since p5<  p8. And running uname again
>> after this results in still seeing p5.
>
> That's not really true.
> Unless an update upgrades the kernel, the result of "uname -a" will
> not change. For it to change, you have to recompile the kernel
> yourself - using the generic of a custom configuration.
>
> Your current release level is the fourth field in
> /var/db/freebsd-update/tag, IIRC.

Thanks for that clarification. That is a very obscure place to look, but it appears to be correct. I had never noticed before the difference between kernel patch level (in uname) and overall system patch level. Many years ago I used to upgrade FreeBSD by compiling kernel and world every time, so I guess those things used to match. But binary updating is so much faster these days and the benefits of optimising the kernel with only the things I need are fairly negligible.

If I could make a suggestion for freebsd-update. When it runs, it might spit out this:

Current system:
-- running kernel 8.1-RELEASE-p4
-- installed kernel 8.1-RELEASE-p5 (will be running after reboot)
-- intalled system 8.1-RELEASE-p8


The second line would be conditionally output only if it differs from the first line.


And of course, some suggestion about how to resolve the modified locally files would be ideal.


Ari




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Aristedes Maniatis
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