[CCed to -questions; please followup to -questions.]
At 21:34 04/07/2003 -0400, Kevin wrote to
freebsd-stable:> I am very new to FreeBSD and just installed 4.8 release. I want to
> upgrade this to stable. I have printed some of the pages out for
> makeworld and CVSUP, I am wondering what the best method for doing the
> updates are, downloading the individual packages and installing or using
> the CVSUP to do this? Currently I used mostly Red Hat Linux but have
> wanted to give this a try for some time now. Any help would be greatly
> appreciated.
If you want to update from 4.8-RELEASE to 4.8-STABLE, cvsup to RELENG_4
and go through the usual make buildworld/make buildkernel/make
installkernel/make installworld/mergemaster. Theoretically, you could use
sysinstall to perform a binary upgrade to the latest STABLE snapshot from
snapshots.jp.freebsd.org, but most people opt for the cvsup/make
route. Short of performing a complete install of the STABLE snapshot,
there isn't any binary upgrade method there; unlike various Linux flavours,
the base FreeBSD system is not split into individual packages.
That said, if you're new to FreeBSD then I don't think you really
want
to upgrade to 4.8-STABLE. More likely, you want to track the FreeBSD 4.8
security branch (RELENG_4_8). For that purpose, there is a binary update
tool: FreeBSD Update. If you use cvsup to update your ports tree, you'll
find FreeBSD Update in /usr/ports/security/freebsd-update/. Of course,
there haven't been any security updates in the two months since FreeBSD 4.8
was released, so (for now) this question is immaterial.
One note about FreeBSD Update: It should *only* be used after performing
a binary install from the official FTP or ISO distributions; if you've
compiled any part of the FreeBSD world locally, FreeBSD Update will not
work properly.
Colin Percival