Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 21:48:26 +0200 From: Szilveszter Adam <sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> To: FreeBSD-Stable <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: restricting installworld to certain distributions Message-ID: <20000526214826.B18664@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> In-Reply-To: <20000526211802.X2305@speedy.gsinet>; from Gerhard.Sittig@gmx.net on Fri, May 26, 2000 at 09:18:02PM %2B0200 References: <20000526211802.X2305@speedy.gsinet>
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Hello! On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 09:18:02PM +0200, Gerhard Sittig wrote: > This is a questions about how to restrict installworld in a way, > so that only the formerly installed distributions get copied. If > this belongs to -questions, please tell me so (although I'm not > subscribed there and don't like to post to channels I don't read > personally). [...] > I guess you already know what I want to ask: Is there a way to > just update the installed software "no matter how voluminous the > /usr/src tree is"? Is there a way for installworld to have a > look at the installed distributions? Or is there a way of > "binary updating" the smaller machine which I just didn't find > out about up to now? Uhm... I do not think there is a way to restrict 'make installworld' apart from the knobs in /etc/make.conf, which prevent some components from building in the first place (like sendmail) but those are more for the case when you've got your own replacements for those and don't want them to be overwritten... Which seems like an obvious problem. However, I think that a binary upgarde can handle this well, because you only select what you want to upgrade when running sysinstall. Of course you can always fiddle with cd-ing into individual directories in the /usr/src tree and doing 'make install's there but I feel these to be wildly unsupported and in fact can see quite a number of cases when they can plainly hose the system or create problems (a major upgrade being one of them but not the only one.) It is no surprise that many Linux distributions that are more package-based than we are base the upgrade procedure entirely on installing binary packages (save for the occasional kernel/modules recompile) A piece of advice though: You can always use a utility called mergemaster(8) to merge the old and new /etc files. I found it to be much more convenient than the old (and more platform-independent) way described in the Handbook that came with the 3.x series. You can either find it in the base system under /usr/sbin or as a port. Also, in order to keep up with the changing documentation, you can go to any ftp mirror site and grab the required format from /pub/FreeBSD/doc/<your language>/ and thus be able to track important changes without having to build the docs yourself from source which requires quite an overhead of tools. But this fact itself isn't documented yet either:-) (unless I am mistaken) > BTW: Is it a feature or an error when "make installworld" won't > run when /usr/src and /usr/obj are mounted (and exported) > readonly? I caught it bailing out at libsdbm.a. Don't know who > else could be involved since I had to remount it rw to make > installworld pass this one step. Hmmm... It would sound weird at first, but as I come to think about it, it may be possible that things are being copied around... but I haven't investigated this yet... Hope this helps... Regards: Szilveszter ADAM Szeged University Szeged Hungary To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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