branches, updates, buildworld

[relay.lists at gmail.com]

Hi,

I'm new to FreeBSD and I'd like to give it a try as a PostgreSQL test
server on an ancient box.

Since I have a lot to learn about this OS, I chose FreeBSD-7.0-RELEASE.
(It's the most current production-ready release now, right?).

On the other hand I'd like to make every possible speed improvement,
because the CPU is Pentium-2 at 400MHz. So, my questions are:

1) After reading the docs I remained with the impression that sources
should be updated for "-current" and "-stable" branches only. Is this
correct?

2) If I'm wrong about (1) how should I update the "-release" sources in
order to "make buildworld" with additional gcc optimisations?

3) "make buildworld" re-compiles _everything_ or the "base system" only?

4) Will "make buildworld" fail with a make.conf like this:

########
PERL_VER=5.8.8
PERL_VERSION=5.8.8
BDECFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -mmmx -pipe -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer \
-combine -fno-strict-aliasing"

CFLAGS+=${BDECFLAGS}
CXXFLAGS=${CFLAGS}
COPTFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -mmmx -pipe -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer \
-combine -fno-strict-aliasing"

BOOTWAIT=3000
DOC_LANG=en
NO_SHAREDOCS=True

WITHOUT_MODULES="INET6 zfs wlan firewire lpt joy iscsi cpufreq coda \
coda5 3dfx acpi unionfs ilpt srv4 smbfs reiserfs pccard palm uscanner \
xfs audiocs emu10k1 fm801 neomagic t4dwave cmi emu10kx hda sb16 uaudio \
 ad1816 cs4281 envy24 ich sb8 via8233 als4000 csa envy24ht maestro \
via82c686 atiixp driver es137x maestro3 solo vibes au88x0 ds1 mss \
spicds"
########