Freebsd-update is both an excellent tool, but also sadly lacking in some ways, mostly documentation. Let's look at a recent experience...
----------------- # uname -a FreeBSD splash.internal 8.1-RELEASE-p5 FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p5 #0: Tue Sep 27 16:49:00 UTC 2011 [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64 # freebsd-update fetch Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 4 mirrors found. Fetching metadata signature for 8.1-RELEASE from update5.FreeBSD.org... done. Fetching metadata index... done. Inspecting system... done. Preparing to download files... done. The following files are affected by updates, but no changes have been downloaded because the files have been modified locally: /var/db/mergemaster.mtree No updates needed to update system to 8.1-RELEASE-p8. ----------------- Some problems: 1. I am clearly running 8.2-p5, but the final message says "no updates needed". That's clearly not correct since p5 < p8. And running uname again after this results in still seeing p5. My guess is that the message should say: No update will be applied until you merge the locally modified files, OR Or else, freebsd-update is just broken and refuses to update the system properly for an unknown reason.
2. I didn't touch mergemaster.mtree manually. Well, I don't think I did. But even if I had, could the tool give me some clue as to how to proceed from here? Do I now have to go back to csup to update my system and never be able to use freebsd-update again? Is there a trick to fool freebsd-update into overwriting this file which I don't think I touched? It would be nice if freebsd-update could be more helpful about what the user should do next when it finds an error. Thanks Ari -- --------------------------> Aristedes Maniatis ish http://www.ish.com.au Level 1, 30 Wilson Street Newtown 2042 Australia phone +61 2 9550 5001 fax +61 2 9550 4001 GPG fingerprint CBFB 84B4 738D 4E87 5E5C 5EFA EF6A 7D2E 3E49 102A _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
