Is there any way to know if userland is patched?

[Xin LI]

Dear folks,

I'm recently investigating large scale deployment and upgrading FreeBSD
RELEASE.  It's our tradition to bump "RELEASE-pN" after a security patch
is applied, however, it seems that there is less method to determine
whether the userland is patched, which is somewhat important for large
site managements.

So is "uname -sr" the only way to differencate the patchlevel of a security
branch?  I have read Colin's freebsd-update script and to my best of
knowledge this is the only way (and, on condition that we have re-compiled
the kernel and installed it, and reboot'ed).  Given the nature of a security
or errata branch, we can expect that no API/ABI changes will occour and it
should be safe to do make installworld/installkernel in any order, and bumping
patchlevel does not mean that a reboot must be done.

Please correct me if I was wrong, thanks.

Cheers,
-- 
Xin LI <delphij frontfree net>	http://www.delphij.net/
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