Today, I would like to 'touch' an ungrateful topic of keeping both FreeBSD's base system and installed packages up-to-date.
After I started using FreeBSD at 5.4 times (2005) I have tried various methods of keeping my FreeBSD installations up-to-date, many of them terribly failed, but some recent ones seem to do the job as advertised. Even not so recently ago I thought, lets stick to RELEASE and do not compile newer versions of packages as there are available packages at FTP ... but there is a big problem with such attitude. First, once the RELEASE is completed, there are only security fixes for the base system, but there are no bug fixes for the RELEASE. Its even worse with packages for RELEASE since once they are built they are never later updated, even if they have security issues, not even mentioning bugs. So that is definitely not the right way.
The sollution seems to be tracking STABLE tree for the base system along with packages that are built every 2 weeks for the STABLE tree and compiling only when there are security issues in some of the installed packages, but there are for example 10 more days before their rebuilt versions would show up on the STABLE tree FTP. Below I would try to describe all that process of keeping FreeBSD up-to-date as simple as possible. In the first part I would focus on the base system and the second one will cover keeping packages up-to-date.
Some important information about keeping Your system this way. You would not rebuild the base system every day, not even every week, just when needed. Now what does it mean 'when needed' ... For example when there is a security issue, You would just follow the instructions in the SA (security advisory) to fix that issue, there is no need to rebuild whole world. The only reasons to rebuild the base system are that there has been found and fixed a bug in STABLE that affects You or that You need new features that has been merged into the STABLE branch (from CURRENT for example) like newer ZFS version or whatever.
As for the installation, You can install the RELEASE version and update to STABLE or install the daily STABLE snapshot so You would not have to build entire base system from source, the daily ISO images are available at http://pub.allbsd.org/FreeBSD-snapshots/ server.
EDIT:
Article also available as PDF here: http://bsdmag.org/magazine/1784-freebsd-get-up-to-date
If You want to have it separated from other articles, here's the way:
[CMD=""]# pkg_add -r pdftk
% pdftk 'BSDmag 2012-01.pdf' cat 28-36 output 'BSDmag 2012-01 up-do-date.pdf'[/CMD]
... or as plain HTML at the bottom of this post.
After I started using FreeBSD at 5.4 times (2005) I have tried various methods of keeping my FreeBSD installations up-to-date, many of them terribly failed, but some recent ones seem to do the job as advertised. Even not so recently ago I thought, lets stick to RELEASE and do not compile newer versions of packages as there are available packages at FTP ... but there is a big problem with such attitude. First, once the RELEASE is completed, there are only security fixes for the base system, but there are no bug fixes for the RELEASE. Its even worse with packages for RELEASE since once they are built they are never later updated, even if they have security issues, not even mentioning bugs. So that is definitely not the right way.
The sollution seems to be tracking STABLE tree for the base system along with packages that are built every 2 weeks for the STABLE tree and compiling only when there are security issues in some of the installed packages, but there are for example 10 more days before their rebuilt versions would show up on the STABLE tree FTP. Below I would try to describe all that process of keeping FreeBSD up-to-date as simple as possible. In the first part I would focus on the base system and the second one will cover keeping packages up-to-date.
Some important information about keeping Your system this way. You would not rebuild the base system every day, not even every week, just when needed. Now what does it mean 'when needed' ... For example when there is a security issue, You would just follow the instructions in the SA (security advisory) to fix that issue, there is no need to rebuild whole world. The only reasons to rebuild the base system are that there has been found and fixed a bug in STABLE that affects You or that You need new features that has been merged into the STABLE branch (from CURRENT for example) like newer ZFS version or whatever.
As for the installation, You can install the RELEASE version and update to STABLE or install the daily STABLE snapshot so You would not have to build entire base system from source, the daily ISO images are available at http://pub.allbsd.org/FreeBSD-snapshots/ server.
EDIT:
Article also available as PDF here: http://bsdmag.org/magazine/1784-freebsd-get-up-to-date
If You want to have it separated from other articles, here's the way:
[CMD=""]# pkg_add -r pdftk
% pdftk 'BSDmag 2012-01.pdf' cat 28-36 output 'BSDmag 2012-01 up-do-date.pdf'[/CMD]
... or as plain HTML at the bottom of this post.