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Date:      Sat, 07 Jan 2012 18:14:04 +1100
From:      Aristedes Maniatis <ari@ish.com.au>
To:        freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   freebsd-update problems
Message-ID:  <4F07F0BC.7060309@ish.com.au>

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Freebsd-update is both an excellent tool, but also sadly lacking in some ways, mostly documentation. Let's look at a recent experience...


-----------------

# uname -a
FreeBSD splash.internal 8.1-RELEASE-p5 FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p5 #0: Tue Sep 27 16:49:00 UTC 2011     root@amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64


# freebsd-update fetch
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 4 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 8.1-RELEASE from update5.FreeBSD.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Inspecting system... done.
Preparing to download files... done.

The following files are affected by updates, but no changes have
been downloaded because the files have been modified locally:
/var/db/mergemaster.mtree

No updates needed to update system to 8.1-RELEASE-p8.

-----------------

Some problems:

1. I am clearly running 8.2-p5, but the final message says "no updates needed". That's clearly not correct since p5 < p8. And running uname again after this results in still seeing p5. My guess is that the message should say:

    No update will be applied until you merge the locally modified files, OR

Or else, freebsd-update is just broken and refuses to update the system properly for an unknown reason.
  

2. I didn't touch mergemaster.mtree manually. Well, I don't think I did. But even if I had, could the tool give me some clue as to how to proceed from here? Do I now have to go back to csup to update my system and never be able to use freebsd-update again? Is there a trick to fool freebsd-update into overwriting this file which I don't think I touched?

It would be nice if freebsd-update could be more helpful about what the user should do next when it finds an error.



Thanks
Ari



-- 
-------------------------->
Aristedes Maniatis
ish
http://www.ish.com.au
Level 1, 30 Wilson Street Newtown 2042 Australia
phone +61 2 9550 5001   fax +61 2 9550 4001
GPG fingerprint CBFB 84B4 738D 4E87 5E5C  5EFA EF6A 7D2E 3E49 102A



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