Upgrade Questions

[andrew clarke]

On Tue 2017-01-10 17:06:11 UTC+0300, Odhiambo Washington (odhiambo at gmail.com) wrote:

> Can I update FreeBSD 9.3 -> 11.0 using source update?? Or that is too
> aggressive, so I need to do 9.3 -> 10.3, then 10.3 -> 11.0??

I suspect the GCC toolchain on 9.x may be too old to build 11.0 from source.

FreeBSD 11.x moved to Clang for the base C compiler, removing GCC, so
it's possible 11.x requires a recent-ish version of Clang to build,
among other things.

> I guess there is so much danger lurking in 9.3-STABLE -> 11.0-STABLE using
> source upgrade, but not 9.3-RELEASE -> 11.0-RELEASE using freebsd-update.

Well "danger" is overstating it. The build will either succeed or not.
If not, your system is still usable, and nothing is lost.

If you're apprehensive you could install 9.3-STABLE in a temporary
virtual machine (or a spare PC) and experiment with upgrading that.

> The former method is prone to failure while the freebsd-update method is
> not. Why so?

The former method shouldn't be "prone to failure" if you upgrade to
10.x in the interim.

freebsd-update doesn't support upgrading from -STABLE versions, so you
can't use it in this instance.

Regards
Andrew