Date: Sun, 25 Jun 1995 00:21:32 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> To: Network Coordinator <nc@ai.net> Cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.ORG>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Announcing 2.0.5-950622-SNAP Message-ID: <199506250621.AAA02309@rover.village.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of Sat, 24 Jun 1995 13:24:47 EDT
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: Rather like the way make works for a source tree in general. Anyway, : count me in for work on the update part of the project. I have a bunch of ideas floating around in my head that I need to find a free minute or 10 and jot down on paper/disk. It should be possible to grab the entire distribution, put it on a large floppy and do an upgrade. However, there are a lot of things that get in the way of doing this just now. Some are easy: New binaries and Libraries. You copy the new ones in, reboot, and you are set. Ditto the kernel, kinda. The format of the kernel config file sometimes changes, and you need to be able to translate old config files to the new ones. This is usually easy. Then you get into the thornier issues: /etc/rc* and /etc/netstart. >From time to time, things need to be added to these file, and you want to preserve, as much as possible, the configuration that has been made here. To sum up some very rough ideas: 1) You need to replace some binaries 2) You need to patch some files 3) You need to convert other files This doesn't address the "dual boot" issue. In that case, you'd want to be able to say "Install the system onto that other device, and use my current system as a template." It also doesn't address the "ooop, that was stupid, I want to go back now." either. Warner
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