binary upgrade of a remote box

[Gregory Orange]

Hi Victor et al,

I am fascinated by what you've said, because noone near me uses FreeBSD, 
and because I've built up how I administer it in one noticeably 
different way to you.

On 20/06/14 20:24, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> I am comfortable with the "make world" method and have done this
> remotely before, but those boxes are too weak to compile their own
> world, and the disks are too small. Mounting /usr/{src,obj} from a
> remote host is not an option because of relatively slow and unreliable
> WAN links.

I have never done any of this, and as such certainly couldn't say I feel 
comfortable with it...

> I am very uncomfortable with "freebsd-update upgrade", at least it's
> not something I would risk remotely.

whereas I do this regularly. I use 'freebsd-update cron' every night for 
update checks, and have recently embarked on upgrading a fleet of 8.3 
machines to 8.4 using 'freebsd-update -r 8.4-RELEASE upgrade', with 
flawless results so far.

So, my question. Is one of the above (make world or freebsd-update) 
considered by the community to be safer, more standard, or recommended?

Cheers,
Greg.