broken instructions for buildkernel

[Tony Hain]

Thanks Adam. 

 

I had been on the page you sent for the 9.0 to 9.1 upgrade of this machine.
My intent was not to upgrade the machine to 10.0, at this point it was just
to build the kernel for a new VM. Granted I am not the most engrained in
FreeBSD procedures, but to me that leads to the "building a kernel" page. 

 

While buildworld may not be a declared prereq, something in that process
"fixes" a missing definition. No matter which distro of 10.0 I tried to
build it would always exit on a missing prototype for yyparse, but after
buildworld it just ran to completion. That sounds like a prereq to me...
Even if it is not, a hint on one or both of the pages that reference
building a kernel, about yyparse failures being fixed by buildworld would
save people frustration and time. If I was the first to stumble over this, I
wouldn't have been able to find discussion about it on the web, and still
wouldn't know how to fix it. 

 

Tony

 

 

From: Adam Vande More [mailto:amvandemore at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 7:01 PM
To: Tony Hain
Cc: doc at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: broken instructions for buildkernel

 

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 6:51 PM, Tony Hain <tony at hain-global-consulting.com>
wrote:

If buildworld is a prereq, why isn't that in the instruction sequence? Even
if it is only required once, on a fresh install it should be possible to
look at the FreeBSD docs and build a custom kernel without hitting errors
and having to search for hints.

 

It isn't a prereq.  Those instructions have remained largely unchanged for
years for a reason. You were following instructions on how to build a new
kernel when in fact you were trying to upgrade FreeBSD.

 

Use these steps and you'll get a lot farther:

 

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/updating-upgrading.html

 

-- 
Adam Vande More