newbie upgrading question

[Ken Smith]

On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 01:17:04PM -0400, Brian Smith wrote:

> I have been working with FreeBSD for about a month now, and it is my first
> foray into the BSD/UNIX/Linux world.  I have a question about upgrading.  I
> have tried several different ways to go about upgrading, and still can't
> seem to get the desired results.  I started out with a 4.8 install from
> ftp.freebsd.org.  My end goal is to build a FreeBSD firewall machine based
> on 4.8-STABLE.  When I put RELENG_4_8 in my supfile,
> download/recompile/etc., uname -a still shows the version at 4.8-RELEASE.
> When I cvsup with RELENG_4 in my supfile, I got upgraded to 4.10-STABLE.  Is
> there any way to upgrade just to 4.8-STABLE?  Am I going about this the
> wrong way?

RELENG_4 is the active development branch for the 4.X series of
releases.  We are just wrapping up the 4.10 release now.  Typically
things that get committed to RELENG_4 have been well tested but at
times it can be slightly risky to use that in a production environment.

A less risky thing to follow is the specific version branches.  You had
tried the right thing which was to cvsup to RELENG_4_8.  I'm not sure
what step(s) you missed when trying to do that, but that is the right
approach for what you want.  You will not however see -STABLE in uname.
You will only see -STABLE on RELENG_4.  What you will see on the
version based branches is something like "4.8-RELEASE-p22" (that is
what you should see now if you cvsup/install from RELENG_4_8).  This
denotes that 22 security related patches have been made to that branch
since it was released.  Only security related patches get applied to
these brances once a release happens, which is why they are slightly
less risky to use in production environments.

-- 
						Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |