Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 13:46:24 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@phone.net> To: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Musings about tracking FreeBSD... Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9903221329060.414-100000@guru.phone.net> In-Reply-To: <19990322231158.A68035@rucus.ru.ac.za>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, Neil Blakey-Milner wrote: > Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 23:11:58 +0000 > From: Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org> > To: Mike Meyer <mwm@phone.net> > Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG > Subject: Re: Musings about tracking FreeBSD... > > On Mon 1999-03-22 (12:11), Mike Meyer wrote: > > > > 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 > > If you have a local copy of /usr/src, simply use anoncvs, and cvs diff the > pertinent bit of the system if you're really in need of the patch. The point > in running -STABLE is that you're getting these little patches all the time, > and you don't have to worry about applying them yourself. Except - as I've just had explained a number of times in a variety of ways - you can't just install the patches. You're supposed to reinstall the whole system. > > First, just to make it clear - I'm not saying that FreeBSD *needs* a > > patch mechanism. Just that there seems to be a level of functionality > > I'm used to seeing that's missing. > > I must say the same thing about other operating systems that don't use CVS. > I just don't understand how people survive without it, and I imagine CVS is > much more of a functional gain than the ability to apply patches you get from > a whole bunch of different people all around the world.. Normally, you get patches from the vendor of the distribution. The vendor takes care of integrating patches from lots of different people for you. Which is exactly what CVS is doing for you. The difference is that they are set up to provide patches against a fixed release, whereas FreeBSD provides a constantly updated release. > > Part of my point was that updating to -STABLE every six weeks or so - > > when -RELEASE is updated every 12-16 weeks - seems pretty pointless. > > Possibly, but it all depends on what you're trying to do. I don't think > -STABLE is all that geared towards people who couldn't be bothered to follow > it. It's point in life is to allow changes to get integrated between > releases, and thus people who are keen to get the cutting edge of the blunt > edge should be following it. If you don't want the hassles, and the releases > are doing it for you, great, just use the releases. Noone is trying to force > you to use -STABLE, I'm sure. You're right, no one is - and I'm not trying to get the behavior of the -STABLE branch changed to match my expectations, either. I got burnt by starting to track -STABLE without properly understanding it. I'm trying to get a better understanding before I decide if I want to stay with -STABLE, or go back to -RELEASE. My problem is, I want cutting edge on critical parts of /usr/ports. But /usr/ports sometimes breaks against -RELEASE, as it gets updated to use new features of tools in -STABLE (fetch adding a new argument, for instance). I've already run into cases where some tools can't be run from the ports tree, because I need access to the source tree for configuration purposes, or to add modules, or whatever. Just dropping back to -RELEASE, and building things I need cutting-edge access to myself is a real possibility. > > However, I noticed another problem. If your syslog is sending log > > messages to a machine that you've shut down (for example, to do a > > "make installworld" on it), it stops logging until you restart it. Is > > this a bug? If so, I'll look into fixing it. If not, I can switch to > > the daemontools port. > > You might want to take this up in another email, as many people who might be > interested in this as a problem might not have been interested in your > Subject line, or initial content. ok... > > Does anyone actually update all such things? Or do they do the more > > realistic thing, and just rebuild things that aren't from /usr/ports - > > or are, for that matter - when they break? Which would also be a > > perfectly reasonable attitude for /usr/src & make/make install > > vs. buildworkd/installworld, and which at least one person recommended > > to me in private mail. > > On quite a few machines recently I went through and made sure we weren't > running any old non-ELF ports, and upgraded as necessary. Since some of > these ports had been installed since before I even came to this university > two-and-a-half years ago, there doesn't seem to be anything that says that > you should go through and update your ports every time you rebuild world. Yeah - a change of binary format sounds like a good time to do a search-and-update on old binaries. I agree about "make world" giving you a nice, warm fuzzy feeling. It would be nice if there were an extended version "make completeworld" that did the groveling through /usr/ports so you could extend that feeling to those things. Of course, in a perfect world, there'd be a hook for getting to the user-built things as well. But that's where things start getting very difficult. <mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.4.05.9903221329060.414-100000>