freebsd-update question

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 01:46:51PM +0200, n j wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> while updating my FreeBSD box, freebsd-update reported:
> 
> Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 1 mirrors found.
> Fetching metadata signature from update1.FreeBSD.org... done.
> ...
> No updates needed to update system to 6.2-RELEASE-p6.
> 
> However, uname -a reveals:
> 
> FreeBSD my.hostname.here 6.2-RELEASE-p4 FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p4 #0: Thu
> Apr 26 17:55:55 UTC 2007
> root at i386-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SMP  i386
> 
> which suggests that my system is still running 6.2-RELEASE-p4, not
> 6.2-RELEASE-p6 that I guess it should be running. The box was rebooted
> a couple of times, but still reports the same.
> 
> My question: am I reading something wrong here or is there a problem
> with freebsd-update? More specifically, is the problem that the system
> is running SMP?

The cause for this confusion is the fact that patches 5 and 6 were for a
userland utility (file) and a library (libarchive), not for the kernel.

So for these patches, the kernel (which contains the release-level
string) isn't rebuilt and so it isn't updated. 

The only ways to fix this are:

1) change the update mechanism to update the kernel(s) version string
2) rebuild the kernel locally.

Whether 1 is appropriate is up to the maintainer, I guess. You could
submit a problem report about it with the send-pr tool.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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