New install, rebuilding world

[Nick Withers]

On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 07:31:20 -0700 (PDT)
AB <eincello at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I'm new to FreeBSD,

Welcome!

> but I've been reading alot in the Handbook about building
> custom kernels and rebuilding world, and still can't seem to
> find what I'm looking for.

"http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html"
should sort you out, but please feel free to ask if you'd like
a trimmed-down, dot-point, step-by-step guide, just to get that
first one under the belt!

> I want to be able to recompile my whole system so that
> it's optimized for my hardware, but I'd rather not
> track -Stable and have to rebuild a whole slew of
> stuff every few days.

Fair enough, though do keep in mind that ports aren't covered
by a "buildworld" et al. procedure.

As Reko suggested, you'll want to track the "RELENG_6_1" CVS
branch at this point, to keep up-to-date with 6.1-RELEASE and
its security updates.

> Can someone give me some advice (or point me to some
> documentation) on recompiling the -Release6.1 and then
> doing light maintenance (bug fixes, security updates)
> afterwards?

See the URL given above.

Security updates can often be applied in a variety of ways
(for instance, an issue in tcsh(1) might mean you can get away
with simply rebuilding and reinstalling tcsh(1), rather than
world), but for now, until at least you're pretty comfortable
with rebuilding world, it's probably best to simply rebuild
world and the kernel each time a security update for
6.1-RELEASE comes out.

Rebuilding world can seem pretty scary at first, but you'll
soon be able to do it almost without thinking about it!

> Thanks,
> Adam
-- 
Nick Withers
email: nick at nickwithers.com
Web: http://www.nickwithers.com
Mobile: +61 414 397 446