Modernizing freebsd-update or moving to source upgrades

[Victor Sudakov]

Colin Henein wrote:

[dd]

> 
> QUESTION: Do I need to do anything special to change over to
> updating fbsd from source if I have been using freebsd-update in the
> past? I see the instructions at section 23.5 of the handbook. Can I
> just check out a new source tree with SVN from the 11.1 repository
> and follow the steps to overwrite 11.0 with 11.1? Very much
> appreciate any tips, especially on merging files in etc.

 From my experience, the source upgrade is more failsafe than the
binary upgrade. If in doubt, I always use the source upgrade.  IMHO
you don't need to do anything special, just follow the instructions in
/usr/src/Makefile, and don't forget the delete-old step.

The mergemaster utility is also much more convenient than
freebsd-update's merge routine, and you can rerun it as many times as
you wish provided you have backed up your original /etc. I have always
wondered if I could somehow use mergemaster together with binary upgrades.

The last problem I had with freebsd-update (AFAIK when upgrading from
9.x to 10.x) was that after the first "freebsd-update install && reboot"
all my network interfaces were gone: the old ifconfig did not go well
with the new kernel. Luckily I had console access. I don't know
however if this would have happened in case of a source upgrade.

-- 
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
AS43859