Updating from 4.8 release to 4.8 stable

[Colin Percival]

[CCed to -questions; please followup to -questions.]

At 21:34 04/07/2003 -0400, Kevin wrote to freebsd-stable:
>     I am very new to FreeBSD and just installed 4.8 release. I want to 
> upgrade this to stable. I have printed some of the pages out for 
> makeworld and CVSUP, I am wondering what the best method for doing the 
> updates are, downloading the individual packages and installing or using 
> the CVSUP to do this? Currently I used mostly Red Hat Linux but have 
> wanted to give this a try for some time now. Any help would be greatly 
> appreciated.

   If you want to update from 4.8-RELEASE to 4.8-STABLE, cvsup to RELENG_4 
and go through the usual make buildworld/make buildkernel/make 
installkernel/make installworld/mergemaster.  Theoretically, you could use 
sysinstall to perform a binary upgrade to the latest STABLE snapshot from 
snapshots.jp.freebsd.org, but most people opt for the cvsup/make 
route.  Short of performing a complete install of the STABLE snapshot, 
there isn't any binary upgrade method there; unlike various Linux flavours, 
the base FreeBSD system is not split into individual packages.
   That said, if you're new to FreeBSD then I don't think you really want 
to upgrade to 4.8-STABLE.  More likely, you want to track the FreeBSD 4.8 
security branch (RELENG_4_8).  For that purpose, there is a binary update 
tool: FreeBSD Update.  If you use cvsup to update your ports tree, you'll 
find FreeBSD Update in /usr/ports/security/freebsd-update/.  Of course, 
there haven't been any security updates in the two months since FreeBSD 4.8 
was released, so (for now) this question is immaterial.

   One note about FreeBSD Update: It should *only* be used after performing 
a binary install from the official FTP or ISO distributions; if you've 
compiled any part of the FreeBSD world locally, FreeBSD Update will not 
work properly.

Colin Percival