Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 15:07:08 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@phone.net> To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Build of 3.1-STABLE failing? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9903211445280.414-100000@guru.phone.net> In-Reply-To: <36F41F71.3F34D172@newsguy.com>
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On Sun, 21 Mar 1999, Daniel C. Sobral wrote: > Running stable is preferable than release. But the targets are > buildworld and installworld. If you make regular backups of userland, that represents quite a bit of work. Since it rebuilds everything in userland, you wind up dumping all of userland with every backup, so you need to do some kind of special backup after doing an installworld. Putting it all together, that's enough work that I wouldn't bother doing it except every 6-8 weeks. But -RELEASE happens about twice that often. What's the point of tracking -STABLE under those conditions? Of course, part of the reason for tracking -STABLE is I want up-to-date versions of various ports. After all, like most users, I have a computer so I can run the apps, not the OS. But here we're told that the ports tree and the OS are tied together - and you shouldn't try using newer versions of the ports without having the appropriate underlying OS. Given that /usr/ports was one of the reasons I chose FreeBSD, not being able to track that closely is a serious hit. This all points to one of the most serious problems with the current release system - that patches seem to be considered impossible. On commercial OS's, or Linux, you see small distributions that fix a few things in userland (a security hole in Sendmail being a typical example). Fixing that is a simple matter of installing that patch and restarting sendmail on the relevant systems (assuming the patch didn't do that for you). On the other hand, here I see a discussion of doing a "point release" instead of a patch. This means that fixing the problem requires reinstalling the OS for all those systems. Surely, anyone who runs more than a few systems doesn't do this? Unfortunately, I don't have a solution, even ignoring the problem of needing to find extra time to do that work. The main reason for doing this is to see if anyone else has ideas for a solution. > > Just one question - what are "make" and "make install" for, then? > > For those who know what they are doing. > For instance, they can be very handy for developers who know what > their modifications are doing or not to the source tree. You mean - people who go in and edit the userland sources? Nuts - that's one of the reasons I *started* tracking -STABLE. I kept hoping the patches I submitted with pr bin/9429 would show up, as well as some of the ports I've done and submitted. > At the very least, you should have tried "world" before asking the > question. True - it would have avoided a lot of flaming on the list. <mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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