portupgrade and freebsd-update: A better way?

[Peter Beckman]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, Garrett Cooper wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 7:13 PM, Peter Beckman <beckman at angryox.com> wrote:
>
>> You get a few production servers with 200+ ports installed, and upgrading
>> could take several days and lots of headaches and a lot of babysitting.
>>
>> Is there a better way?  Does portsnap or portmanager or portupgrade keep
>> track?  What have I missed?
>
> 7.x and 6.2 aren't ABI compatible, so unfortunately no, you have to
> babysit a bit.

Is there some sort of chart that shows binary application compatibility
between FreeBSD versions?  That'd be handy.

It took me a bit to find out that GENERIC now included SMP, but several
google searches have led me to no good data.

I found this:
http://people.freebsd.org/~deischen/symver/library_versioning.txt

But `cat /usr/src/lib/libc/Versions.def` got me no real data.

I did also find this:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/VendorInformation

     "No compatibility for API and ABI is guaranteed from one to the next
      major release, though an effort is made to make the upgrade process and
      source code changes as untroubled as possible."

Is it safe to assume ABI compatibility between minor releases (6.1 -> 6.2)
and must recompile everything between major releases (6.3 -> 7.0)?

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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