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Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 14:04:59 -0400
To: Simon Gao <gao@schrodinger.com>, questions@freebsd.org
From: Jeff Palmer <questions@totaldiver.net>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: What's so compelling about FreeBSD?
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At 01:45 PM 10/16/2006, Simon Gao wrote:
>I have a few FreeBSD machine from 4.x to 5.x. I have asked people how to
>upgrade them to latest version 6.x cleanly. All I was told is that I
>need to wipe them out and reinstall. However, this is not the case with
>Gentoo Linux. With Gentoo, version release does not matter that much,
>you can always keep your system up to date if you like. Of cause, you
>can also choose staying at a certain version.
>
>Linux supports more devices than FreeBSD, especially new devices.

Whoever gave you the 'wipe and reinstall' advice for the 5.x to 6.x 
migration was insane.

4.x to 6.x is a pain, due to major changes in /dev (5.x and later use 
devfs, 4.x doesn't)   but can still be done.
but the 5.6 to 6.x migration is fairly straight forward with a 
buildworld and a couple minor caveats as noticed in UPDATING.

Jeff

P.S.  while 4.x to 5.x is possible,  I'd still personally do a 
wipe/reinstall.    5.x to 6.x,  I'd build world.