howto sidestep sysinstall during installation

Michael Powell nightrecon at verizon.net
Mon May 11 20:09:55 UTC 2009


Saifi Khan wrote:

> On Mon, 11 May 2009, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> 
>> >
>> > Putting out a monthly snapshot is nice and if the people are
>> > going to not find info about 'Fixit#' and commands in the
>> > legendary handbook, that is not very helpful.
>> 
>> FreeBSD doesn't work this way, you are trying to fit FreeBSD into your
>> Gentoo way of thinking. Obviously this causes pain, please stop.
>> 
> 
> i'll be highly obliged, if you could share some nuggets of
> wisdom on 'the FreeBSD way' ! Please.
> 
> 
Don't know about 'wisdom', per se, from me... But consider this:

FreeBSD software development is a tree with 3 main branches from the trunk.
They are -Release, -Stable, and -Current (aka HEAD).

-Release is what a newcomer should use, or if used in a production
environment. The -Release branch does receive ongoing maintenance in the
form of security updates. 

-Stable is where newer software from -Current (HEAD) is merged backwards.
An example would be a driver bug that was fixed in 8.0-Current would be
made available in 7.2-Stable. The main purpose for using -Stable is for
when some specific problem you are having in 7.2-Release has been fixed,
and updating from -Release to -Stable is how you go about obtaining the fix.

-Current (aka HEAD) is the place where active development on the next
version takes place. For example, the code that is in -Current today will
eventually be FreeBSD-8. You would run this if you were an active developer
knowing full well that it could have deficiencies at any given time. The
work is fluid and is known to break, with the idea that only programmers who
can assist in fixing what breaks should be using it.

A Snapshot is a frozen in time snapshot of -Current. Therefore, it is not
what a newcomer or regular user should be using. The -Release install can
always be updated to -Stable or -Current at a later time should it be 
necessary.

-Mike
 





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