Continue upgrading after failed merge

H

hruodr

We read in the manual https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html the following:

Once all the patches have been downloaded to the local system, they will be applied. This process may take a while, depending on the speed and workload of the machine. Configuration files will then be merged. The merging process requires some user intervention as a file may be merged or an editor may appear on screen for a manual merge. The results of every successful merge will be shown to the user as the process continues. A failed or ignored merge will cause the process to abort. Users may wish to make a backup of /etc and manually merge important files, such as master.passwd or group at a later time.
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And then, after the failed merge one must begin the whole story with very long steps (system inspecting, patch download, patch applying, blah, blah) from the begining?!
 
Ok, skip my previous message. I was under the impression that you meant another type of merge. It helps to be a little more specific ;)

There are no very long steps. It's all an issue of running freebsd-update and let it do its job. Just be sure that you configured /etc/freebsd-update.conf accordingly.
 
Everything takes a lot of time, even "Inspecting the system", "Preparing to download files", ...

Installing the new version of FreeBSD is faster than with freebsd-update -r 11.2 upgrade.

Does this look reasonable (y/n)?

NO!

Note: after doing the above command again, it indeed does not fetch again the files, but does the other time consuming steps.
 
Of course an upgrade will take longer, because the system needs to account for any manual changes which obviously need to be preserved. A clean installation is basically nothing more but extracting a few archives.

You could somewhat enforce this by reconfiguring freebsd-update. For example through the MergeChanges option. This could allow freebsd-update not to bother with merging at all and simply overwrite the whole /etc structure with updated copies. Do be careful though because this would also include files such as /etc/rc.conf, /etc/syslog.conf and /etc/passwd which usually contain pretty important changes.

And if you want more control over the upgrade process then you can get that by building the system using the source code. This allows you to control every stage of the actual upgrade: the merging of the configuration files using mergemaster and the actual installation / overwriting of the base system through # make installworld.

But even so: upgrading takes time.
 
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