cvsup newbie questions

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Friday 17 December 2004 01:11 pm, Kevin Smith <smithcam at adelphia.net> 
wrote:
> I'm interested in upgrading to gnome 2.8 (and possibly the newer
> releases of other applications)...I'm running the following version
> of freebsd:
>
>  5.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE #0: Fri Nov  5 04:19:18 UTC 2004
> root at harlow.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
>
> In starting to learn cvsup, I'm trying to figure out what I need.
>
> The "src-all" collection seems like it is more than I want to update.
> Freebsd seems to  be working fine on my system and I don't think that
> I want to upgrade any kernel or OS-related programs unless any
> applications that I would want depend on it.

Most of your questions have already been answered, but I thought it 
might be worth emphasizing a couple of things. First, unless you know 
exactly why you want to update only part of your sources, and you know 
exactly what those sources contain, then it's probably best to update 
all your sources. This is because a buildworld or build kernel could 
fail if you only update part of your sources and there are old versions 
of other files hanging around, or it could cause other issues even if 
it builds and installs.

> So, if I am just interested in the latest fixes/version for
> applications running on 5.3-Release, should I just upgrade the ports
> collection ?

No, the ports collection is the collection of 3rd-party apps' Makefiles 
and patches - it just simplifies installing applications. To accomplish 
what you want, you should cvsup src-all with RELENG_5_3: 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html , 
which, after a complete build, installworld and kernel: 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html , 
should bring you up to patchlevel 2. This would be a good idea in 
general, as vulnerabilities in fetch and procfs have been fixed (you 
can subscribe to security alerts here: 
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-security-notifications ). 
You can also customize your kernel config file before you do this: 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/kernelconfig-building.html 

> There is an example supfile in 
> /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile. Would this be the best
> configuration to use ?

You should use that for updating your ports tree, which you can or 
should do before upgrading and/or installing apps.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/28/FreeBSD_Basics.html?page=1

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/07/FreeBSD_Basics.html

You can also install apps the "traditional" way, but the ports system is 
fairly reliable, although it has its quirks (which is to be expected 
with 12,000+ port entries).

> Also, when I do upgrade the ports tree, I'm assuming it will just
> upgrade the skeleton tree, correct ?

Right, and the Makefiles and patches, but not the sources. Those can be 
fetched by themselves with various installation switches, and that's 
also done automatically when compiling and installing apps through 
ports.

> Even if I do upgrade "src-all", 
> its not going to down load the .tar files for all the source code ?

It will download all the source code for FreeBSD, which you should do if 
you're going to rebuild for an update. You can keep it there afterwards 
for future upgrades or refinements (in /usr/src) unless space is a 
serious consideration.

- jt