Is there any way to know if userland is patched?

[Julian Elischer]

Xin LI wrote:
> 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.

I upgrade systems by creating packages which contain all upgraded files
I have a set of makefiles etc. checked into my local CVS tree that check out
a freeBSD tree at a given revision and build it (withlocal patches added)
and then extracts out fies according to a list I supply. On completion I check 
the list in too, so I can theoretically recreate that patch..

I use the package system to keep track of which packages are loaded onto a 
system, and newer upgrade packages always have earlier ones as dependencies..

> 
> Cheers,