Upgrading without building and without freebsd-update

[Glen Barber]

Hi,

On 7/1/10 6:48 AM, Anders Andersson wrote:
> 2010/7/1 Christer Solskogen<christer.solskogen at gmail.com>
>
>> I've got two FreeBSD machines on two different networks(and two
>> different locations). One of them is as fast machine (i7-920) while
>> the other one is a Intel Atom. How can I build on the fast machine and
>> use those binaries on the slow one, without mounting /usr/obj using
>> nfs? first I was thinking about creating a dump file on the fast
>> machine and extract that on the slow, but that wont work on a
>> filesystem that is already populated. Would a tarfile work? (how about
>> /libexec/ld-elf.so.1?)
>>
>> --
>> chs,
>>
>
> Hello!
>
> I can provide some help at least. I found the page
> http://onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/07/FreeBSD_Basics.html which says that
> "make package" creates tgz packages which you can copy over to the slow
> machine and use pkg_add to install.
>

This works for ports.  The OP is asking about the base system.

> Commands that "might" be intresting to read about:
> make fetch
> portinstall
>
> As I am quiet new to this as well, lets hope someone else can explain how to
> extract all packages easily (make package seems to work on one single
> package, portinstall has an option for making packages as it works through
> the build process whihc can be handy to create all dependencies in one go)
> and what to think about when building for different architectures (if that
> is necessary).
>

You could use 'make package-recursive', or have a look at 
ports-mgmt/tinderbox, which does this by default.

Regards,

-- 
Glen Barber