Tracking base system and kernel updates/vulnerabilities

[Anselm Strauss]

On Apr 15, 2008, at 20:28 , Lowell Gilbert wrote:

> Anselm Strauss <amsibamsi at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> is there a tool, like portaudit for the ports tree, to track updates
>> and/or vulnerabilities for the base system and the kernel? What I'm
>> looking for is a tool that will check my current installation against
>> a specific checkout of the CVS source and kernel trees considering a
>> specific CVS tag and inform me where my system is outdated and
>> vulnerable. I don't know if this is even possible by just having the
>> CVS trees ...
>>
>> For the kernel, is there something like a linear version number in  
>> the
>> -STABLE branches? I noticed there's a pX in the kernel version for
>> release kernels. How do I for example compare the currentness of two
>> 7.0-STABLE kernels if I don't know from what source they were build?
>
> freebsd-update(8)

Yep, that's exactly what I was looking for (must have overlooked it).  
Had some trouble until I noticed it will only work if the running  
kernel has a -RELEASE tag in it's uname, but now I also see how this  
works with the patch version.

I have 2 small questions left:

- Can I somehow determine the version of the base system without  
running uname on the kernel (I could have a release base system but  
run a stable kernel for example)? Sure, I could take the indirect way  
over freebsd-update again, but is there some sort of version  
information stored in the base system?

- Is there some list of all possible components in the base system? So  
far I've seen src, kernel and world. Are there more?

Thanks,
Anselm