BSD Installer Technology Preview (2005.0721) Available - please help test

[Chris Pressey]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2005 11:41:34 -0700
walt <wa1ter at xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> walt wrote:
> 
> > As an alternative -- I think maybe a 'make upgrade' would
> > do that automatically, but I'm not sure.  I dunno if the
> > 'upgrade' mode of the installer does a 'make upgrade' or
> > not, but perhaps it should?
> 
> Silly me, I overlooked the obvious:  there a a few pathetic
> individuals (like sysadmins) who just can't be bothered to
> re-compile the system from source code every day like us
> normal people!  There may even be a few psychotics out there
> who don't even have a /usr/src directory.  We can only have
> pity for such people...

Right now, the "Upgrade" essentially just copies the binaries from the
system directories on the CD (basically /boot, /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin,
/usr/sbin, /usr/lib, and /usr/libexec) over the binaries on the target
system.  (Before and after this it clears and sets the "schg" flag as
appropriate, so that it can copy all files.)

It doesn't touch /var, /etc, or /usr/local.

Ideally, it should also apply all the upgrade procedures between the old
version and the new version... however, these procedures change often
(witness Joerg's pam.conf change of today,) aren't rigorously documented
(src/UPDATING still claims that DragonFly can be built on FreeBSD 4.x
although ISTR it can't anymore,) aren't automated perfectly ("make
upgrade", as you noted, requires a source tree,) aren't necessarily
agreed upon (even though it is not supported, some people prefer
mergemaster to "make upgrade" because mergemaster is more accomodating)
and in the end, might conflict with whatever customized process the
admin really wants anyway.

(This hasn't even addressed ports/packages and what changes they may
require, which is a whole nother headache.)

So, in short, we'll try to come up with some reasonable configuration-
updating process (suggestions are welcome!) but the lowest common
denominator will still have to be to tell the user to update their
configuration manually.  :(

Thanks,
-Chris