Binary upgrade from legacy version

[Matthew Seaman]

Svein Halvor Halvorsen wrote:
> Hi, list!
> 
> I want to upgrade two freebsd machines I have from 6.1-SECURITY and
> 5.3-RELEASE respectively, to the latest 7.0 release of FreeBSD. I
> don't want to cvsup and build, but prefer to use prebuilt binaries.
> Also I'd like to avoid wiping the systems, and starting afresh.
> 
> I know this might break my systems and are willing to take the risk.
> I also reqognize that I probably have to rebuild a lot of ports
> afterwards.
> 
> What steps do I take to increase my probablity of success? How do I
> do this the cleanest way possible? Could I just get all the
> distfiles and put them on top of my old system? How do I find files
> that are to be deleted from the old system?

The cleanest way possible really is wipe and reinstall.  For your
5.3 systems, I'd strongly recommend you do exactly that -- 5.3 is almost certainly too old to support the newer upgrading mechanisms that have
come into use since it was released and upgrading by cvsup+rebuild will
be exceedingly tedious, as you'll have to take it in a number of steps to
get all the way to 7.0.

For your 6.1 systems, you can update by cvsup+rebuild to RELENG_6_3 in
one step, or via there to RELENG_7_0 in two. (Actually, you can probably
do 6.1->7.0 in one step, but it's not guaranteed to work properly)  You
will need to rebuild all your installed software, which is not a trivial 
undertaking but once you've got past the first few hurdles rapidly becomes 
nothing more than time-consuming.

If your 6.1 system is using a system installed from one of the official
iso images and hasn't been locally rebuilt (upgrading via freebsd-updates
is OK though) then there is a quicker way.  See

  http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11.html

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
                                                  Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
                                                  Kent, CT11 9PW

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