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Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 06:17:11 -0700 (MST)
From: Alan Lundin <aflundi@lundin.abq.nm.us>
Message-Id: <199610301317.GAA13054@lundin.abq.nm.us>
In-Reply-To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
       "Re: 2.1.5r -> current upgrade" (Oct 30,  3:52pm)
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To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
Subject: Re: 2.1.5r -> current upgrade
Cc: current@freebsd.org
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On Oct 30,  3:52pm, Michael Smith wrote:
> Subject: Re: 2.1.5r -> current upgrade
> 
> Seriously, yes, you'll want to do that in most cases, but the point I was
> making was that all these whines about "upgrading to -current is so hard"
> are people making their own trouble, not anything wrong with the tree
> per se.

Just to lend support to what Michael is saying, I
just decided to do exactly that a couple of days
ago, and was astonished at how easy it was.  That's
not to say there aren't snags, like:

   * being unsure about current, I wanted to have current
     on one disk, and 2.1.5R on another.  It took me a
     while to discover that only SCSI targets 0 and 1
     where bootable from the default BSD boot -- at
     least with my hardware.

   * the CVS tree is big, and doing things like
     "ctm /ctmfiles*" and "cvs co world" take a long time
     (at least they do on my 486).

   * "make world" takes a really, really long time!
     Especially when it stops a few hours into the make
     complaining that -Tdownps (on a groff command) isn't
     a supported type.  Apparently, something in the "make
     world" process used the PRINTER env var as a groff
     output type!

In any case, with disk space and time, -current is
approachable, just like Michael says.

--alan