Need to build some systems this week. Snapshots?

[Brett Glass]

At 02:22 PM 8/28/2003, Colin Percival wrote:

>  FreeBSD Update only concerns itself with the base FreeBSD distribution -- I simply don't have the resources to build any more than that.  However, one simple approach to the ports problem would be to
>  # find /usr/local/ -perm +111 -type f -exec file {} \; | grep "statically linked" | cut -f 1 -d ':'
>and rebuild the applicable ports.  Now that I think about it, I might add some sort of functionality like that (providing a listing of ports which need to be rebuilt) into a future version of FreeBSD Update.

This would be a big help. It would be even better if it could also identify binary
packages that need updating (since this, after all, has historically been one of 
the biggest problems with updating FreeBSD. 

Of course, the problem with packages is more serious than with ports, because 
the project has always (for no reason that I can see other than habit) treated 
binary packages as "second class citizens" compared to ports. Ports can be updated
at any time and recompiled. But if there's a bug in a program which has been 
installed as a package, there's no way for a user to get a freshened package until 
the next release of the OS! While the project builds binary snapshots of the OS
itself nightly, it doesn't rebuild and post packages in between releases. Yes, a 
user can sometimes uninstall the package and reinstall the same application as a 
port (after fixing the relevant libraries). But if disk space is tight, or the 
system is embedded or doesn't include a compiler (embedded or semi-embedded
implementations of the BSDs are becoming more and more common), this might not 
be possible. 

I'd like to see the project rebuild binary packages regularly so that a user
(or a utility such as your updater) can fetch repaired versions of them as needed.
It should be easy to tell which ones need rebuilding, so that it's unnecessary to
rebuild the entire collection every night.

--Brett