Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 08:47:10 +0100 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: Gary Singleton <gsinglet1@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Staying up to date - easy way? Message-ID: <20030703074710.GC39313@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20030702233852.44521.qmail@web40607.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20030702233852.44521.qmail@web40607.mail.yahoo.com>
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--k4f25fnPtRuIRUb3 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 04:38:52PM -0700, Gary Singleton wrote: > Here's my question. Is there a simple way to stay up to date with > FreeBSD? The install was great! But the whole CVSup, rebuild thing > seems a little much to do for just security updates. Is it just a huge > thing the first time you do it and get smaller / faster after that or > am I just completely missing something else. Could I make a refuse > file and refuse everything except what I need? Am I clueless? I take it you're tracking one of the release branches -- eg. RELENG_4_8 -- in which case, I don't think there has been any updates to that branch since 4.8 was released. If you subscribe to the freebsd-security-notifications@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-security-notifications you'll be notified whenever there's a security problem that needs attention --- and it usually is just important security patches that get applied to the release branches. Fixes to make important functionality work properly might also be made, but these are very rare. Given the security advisory, you will be able to run cvsup(1) to grab the updated sources, and you can usually just recompile only the affected part of the system according to the instructions in the advisory. Managing ports with cvsup(1) is always going to involve a lot more effort. That's because there's about 9000 ports each of which could be updated at any time. At a very rough count there's something like 20 port updates committed per day. When you cvsup(1) the ports, that means you're going to see a lot of output scrolling past. But remember, the whole ports tree is only 140Mb or so, and you're probably not seeing much more than a megabyte of actual changes in a week. The thing that makes port management a real dream is using portupgrade(1) -- this automates all of the tedious chores and generally is the best thing since sliced bread. =20 > I always used Debian's apt-get update / upgrade stuff before and it was > a really simple process. I don't doubt that FreeBSD is very powerful > but I like to be up to date with patches and stuff but don't want to > rebuild everything every time. portupgrade(1) is in my opinion equally as easy to use as apt-get(1). =20 There's a difference in philosophy: ports is really all about downloading and compiling the source code, and the ports system generally makes that a no-brainer. However, by giving the '-P' flag to portupgrade(1) you can download precompiled packages --- for certain ports like OpenOffice, the compilation is a real monster, so downloading the package is the way to go. Other ports --- like the natie JDKs --- are *only* available if you compile them yourself from source. Note that updated packages are generally not available as quickly as the updates to ports, especially at the moment when the package building cluster is doing double duty building packages for both 4.x and 5.x branches. Cheers, Matthew --=20 Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks Savill Way PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK --k4f25fnPtRuIRUb3 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQE/A99+dtESqEQa7a0RAtZiAJ0ZBvT5vbM/4pxopQKCPxQdm04MsQCfWKSd c1ch6i/NbqeaCOfrAGekdj4= =aXnM -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --k4f25fnPtRuIRUb3--
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