Maintaining a Minimal Installation for a Small HDD

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Iain Dooley" <iain_dooley at hotmail.com> writes:

> do i need to edit the Makefiles? how can i cvsup only those programs
> in contrib that i need? my aim here is to have a compact source tree
> that i can use cvsup to keep current, but only takes up a couple of
> hundred meg.

Doing this is not supported.  One of FreeBSD's strong points is the
fact that it *is* a whole operating system, not just a collection of
pieces.  That doesn't mean it's impossible -- lots of us are using
partial subsets of the source tree for embedded projects -- but it
does mean that anyone trying to do so are pretty much on our own.

Your easiest path for a source upgrade is probably to do a remote
mount of disk space over a network (beware security concerns...) and
use that to hold a full source tree.  It will be slow, but just leave
it to do the build over the weekend and you should be set (or do the
build itself on another machine, and just install from there).

The recommended path is to do a binary upgrade.  5.4 will be out in a
few weeks, and release candidate builds are available now.

Good luck.