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Date:      Mon, 6 Jul 1998 10:52:51 +0100
From:      nik@iii.co.uk
To:        Dan Cooper <dcooper@fvt.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD-Stable <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Questions on the subject buildworld subject
Message-ID:  <19980706105251.20749@iii.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <001301bda6bc$1b208360$0201a8c0@pell.fvt.com>; from Dan Cooper on Fri, Jul 03, 1998 at 12:52:27PM -0700
References:  <001301bda6bc$1b208360$0201a8c0@pell.fvt.com>

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On Fri, Jul 03, 1998 at 12:52:27PM -0700, Dan Cooper wrote:
> The tutorial mentions that you can use '-jx' as an option with the -current
> source to allow make to spawn 'x' simultaneous processes (-j4 was
> recommended for single CPU machines) to speed up the build.  Can you do this
> with 2.2-stable and does it speed up the build significantly?

You can do this with -stable, but as with -current it may not always work.
While people don't go out of their way to break this functionality,
mistakes do happen.

If you want to try it, you can't damage your system with

    # make -j4 buildworld

If it works, great. If it doesn't work, you just have to do 'buildworld'
again without the '-j' parameter. All you've lost is a bit of time.

How much it speeds the build up will depend on your system. A system with
a fast CPU and slow disks will see a more dramatic improvement than one
with a slow CPU and fast disks.

I 'buildworld' fairly frequently, with /usr/obj as a local filesystem and
/usr/src NFS mounted, and it makes a vast improvement in that case.
 
> Also, the post install step discusses updating the configuration files in
> /etc, /usr, and /var.  The tutorial recommends creating a dummy directory,
> installing the new /etc and other files, and then going through and
> comparing each new file with its old counterpart to see if there are any
> changes.  My question:  is there an easier way of doing this?  

Not exactly. The first time you do it it can be a pain, typically because
a lot of files have changed.

However, if you follow the tip to give the new directory a timestamp 
under /var/tmp, and build the world fairly frequently then you can compare
the differences that have been made to the source tree in the intervening
time. Typically these will be fairly small, cutting down the amount of
work you need to do in order to do the merge.

> Is there a list of important revisions to configuration files somewhere?

You can get a list of all the revisions if you keep the full CVS tree 
locally. That takes ~ 750MB of space, so may not be an option in your
case. Instead, you could use the web interface. Here's the revision log
for the /etc/rc.conf file;

    <URL:http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/etc/rc.conf>;

N
-- 
Work: nik@iii.co.uk                       | FreeBSD + Perl + Apache
Rest: nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk    | Remind me again why we need
Play: nik@freebsd.org                     | Microsoft?

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