Feedback and Questions Updating to CURRENT

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Sun, 10 May 2009 16:34:28 -0500, Jon Loeliger <jdl at jdl.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I started with a 7.2-RC2 install and have been converting
> it to CURRENT over the past few days.  I've been following
> the bouncing ball over in
>     http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html
> and I think I was (mostly) successful.
>
> One pretty darn confusing aspect of this web site page is that, in
> outline, basically reads:
>
>     - You should follow these 8 instructions
>     - Here's a review of the 8 steps.
>     - Now, in detail, here are the steps.

You are right that there is a fair bit of improvement we could make to
the 'make world from scratch' chapter.  I've thought a bit about this
and I think we need to split this in at least a few more parts:

    - How to update from X.0-RELEASE to a newer Y.0-RELEASE.

    - How to upgrade from X.0-RELEASE to RELENG_X (for security updates
      only).

    - How to upgrade across major releases (from X.0-RELEASE to some
      newer Y.0-RELEASE or later code).

    - How to upgrade from X-STABLE to Y-CURRENT.

There is inevitably some amount of repetition in these four upgrade
procedures, but it may be more intuitive to have *all* the steps for
each one of them in a consecutive section.

If that sounds like something that would simplify things and make the
upgrade steps more useful, please help us organize the documentation to
match a better shape by posting any ideas to freebsd-doc.

> But I confess, I am dubious that the 7.2-RC2 to 8.0-CURRENT doesn't
> mandate a few recompiles of some X packages or libraries.  Is there a
> way to force all those dependencies for already installed packages to
> be updated or recompiled in the new 8.0 world view?

If you upgrade from 7.X-RELEASE to CURRENT it is probably a good idea to
rebuild all ports with:

    pkgdb -Fu && portupgrade -fa

or:

    portmaster -fa

Every time you `portsnap fetch' and `portsnap update' you should look at
`/usr/ports/UPDATING' too.  Some the `UPDATING' file lists important
upgrade steps that have to be performed manually.