Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002 14:05:47 +0100 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: Jeff Penn <jeff@jrpenn.demon.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: portupgrade with package Message-ID: <20020622130547.GA285@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi> In-Reply-To: <20020622124135.A1730@jrpenn.demon.co.uk> References: <20020622102616.A1192@jrpenn.demon.co.uk> <3D144F7F.DBFD24AF@liwing.de> <20020622124135.A1730@jrpenn.demon.co.uk>
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On Sat, Jun 22, 2002 at 12:41:35PM +0100, Jeff Penn wrote: > I'm obviously missing something with my understanding of the ports system. > I thought that following -STABLE or -RELEASE only selected the src tree to > follow. Is this explained in the handbook or elsewhere?. The best description of how ports and packages fit in with the release process is Murray's magnum opus about release engineering: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng/article.html In general the packages supplied with any FreeBSD release are just a snapshot of the state of the ports tree around the time of the release. There is no CURRENT vs STABLE vs RELENG_4_x branch structure in the ports tree. The packages available on the ftp sites are categorised into `package-X.Y-release' subdirectories, but for the most part these are just aliases for `packages-5-current' or `packages-4-stable'. This is how the /pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386 directory is laid out on ftp2.uk.freebsd.org today: packages -> packages-stable packages-4-current -> packages-4-stable packages-4-stable packages-4.0-release -> packages-4-stable/ packages-4.1-release -> packages-4-stable/ packages-4.2-release -> packages-4-stable/ packages-4.3-release -> packages-4-stable/ packages-4.4-release -> packages-4-stable/ packages-4.5-release packages-4.6-release packages-5-current packages-5.0-current -> packages-5.0-dp1/ packages-5.0-dp1 packages-current -> packages-5-current packages-stable -> packages-4-stable Only recent releases have their own separate packages directory (ie. packages-4.5-release), and that will contain the same packages as on the released CD set. That's so that using sysinstall to do an install over the network will achieve the same result as installing from CD. The packages-4-stable and packages-5-current directories however just track the state of the ports tree on a weekly basis. As this is a large amount of stuff and it changes fairly regularly, not all FreeBSD ftp mirrors will carry it. Eg. ftp.uk.freebsd.org and ftp2.uk. have everything, but ftp3.uk. is more selective. If you're using any version of FreeBSD 4, and so long as you update any dependencies appropriately then any packages under `packages-4-stable' should work for you. Just because you're running RELENG_4_5 doesn't mean that you should only use packages from the packages-4.5-release directory. In fact, if you're concerned about security you definitely shouldn't limit yourself to just those packages, or you won't pick up on security or other bug fixes. There has been some discussion about this setup inspired by the recent "Chunked Transfer Encoding" security bug in apache being made public so soon after 4.6-RELEASE and the fact that anyone installing from 4.6 CDs or by sysinstall will therefore be installing an exploitable version of apache. The idea as I understand it is that, say, an installation from CD Rom will prompt you to set up a network connection and then go out to the net to check for updates and important news whenever you select a package to install. Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks Savill Way Tel: +44 1628 476614 Marlow Fax: +44 0870 0522645 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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