Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 15:18:20 -0500 From: Travis Whitton <whitton@atlantic.net> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Upgrade strategy for production server Message-ID: <20040314201820.GA4877@grub.ath.cx>
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Hello all, After working with Linux on a number of levels for the last 5 years, I've decided to try FreeBSD. I just finished installing 4.9, and I have everything tweaked to fit my needs. I'm tracking RELENG_4_9, and so far so good with everything. Now on to my question, I just noticed that 5.3 will probably be coming out sometime in the near future, which makes me wonder if I've made the wrong decision in installing 4.9. Honestly, there aren't really any features in 5.3 that I think I'll really need, but I'm concerned about the lifespan of the 4.x branch. How long will it be until ports start failing due to using an older branch? How long can I feasibly run on the 4.x branch? I wouldn't be so concerned; however, once this server is in place, it will be running some very critical services and the thought of backing everything up and installing from scratch to migrate to 5.x just represents too much unnecessary downtime. It seems that there isn't any clean way to upgrade between major versions due to differing filesystems (UFS and UFS2) and leftover relics from previous releases causing potential problems. What do most people do for their longterm upgrade strategy with FreeBSD on production servers? Sorry for the long-winded question, but I want to get this right the first time, so I don't end up kicking myself down the road. I'd also prefer not to have to do a full reinstall once a year or whenever a new major release happens just to get support. One last thing, I recently patched a port, dbf2mysql, in order to get it to work properly with mysql323-server. What is the proper way to get this patch committed to the ports tree? It seems generally useful to anyone using the program, and I would rather not have to manually patch everytime I upgrade the port. Thanks, Travis Whitton
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