9.0 vs 9.1

[Daniel Staal]

--As of January 10, 2013 8:02:01 PM -0600, Scott Eberl is alleged to have 
said:

> OK can someone please explain this to me in detail? I've been reading all
> the release notes I can find and I'm not understanding why after upgrading
> to 9.1 I have to compile from source to install stuff now. It takes
> forever and asks me questions I have no idea what the answer is to. Early
> today I installed irssi which I had to do with make clean install because
> just doing pkg_add -r irssi complains about not being able to find the
> url of it.
>
> Should I just reinstall 9.0 and not upgrade, will ports work correctly
> then?

--As for the rest, it is mine.

It's not really because of the release; the same problem actually affects 
9.0, but you don't notice it because you can still get old packages.

The basic problem is that there was a security breach in the Freebsd build 
and distribution network.  Therefore, until parts of it have been rebuilt, 
it cannot be trusted.  So, there are no trusted servers to build packages 
at the moment.  This was mentioned in a security advisory a while back - 
well before the release.

Since trusted packages of old versions of ports still exist in the required 
locations, 9.0 can see them.  There is no particular reason to believe 
those packages wouldn't work under 9.1, but on the other hand there is no 
particular reason to believe that *all* of them still work, (other than 
there shouldn't have been any changes that affected them) and it is known 
that they are out of date, so they haven't been moved to the required 
locations for 9.1.

The Freebsd team is working on rebuilding their build and distribution 
network, but it will take time, and I believe getting 9.1 out may have been 
considered higher priority.  (Mostly because it was so close to done.) 
Until then, building from source is secure and trusted - and is the only 
way to get up-to-date ports for *either* 9.0 or 9.1.

Daniel T. Staal

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