How easy/hard are updates/upgrades?

[Jávorszky Balázs]

Hi,

So far I've had an extremely good experience with both the os upgrades 
and the quarterly library updates. They worked flawlessly to me with two 
exceptions:

- Once the nginx package was updated but the corresponding nginx-full 
wasn't. I used the former and one .so lib from the latter, so the change 
was breaking to me. I couldn't downgrade without further issues, so I 
notified the team who fixed it very quickly. This was the only time when 
something bad happened that I could "blame" on the Dragonfly team, and 
it was rectified pretty soon.

- Deluge (a bittorrent client) didn't survive the python3.7 -> python3.9 
(or 3.8?) transition prescribed in the upgrade. This is clearly a deluge 
related problem.

There's a good guide for os upgrade. If you follow it word by word, you 
shouldn't face any problem, at least this is my experience. I'm not 
entirely sure about how a non-technical user would cope with it, though.

There are some packages that are compiled with "wrong" flags (ie. 
php81-pecl-imagick requires ImageMagick6, I use ImageMagick6-nox, but 
there's no php81-pecl-imagick-nox). Then you need to compile the package 
yourself. There's a guide for that too, details are kinda messy, and 
this part is not that well documented, I had to find out a lot of stuff. 
Now regular package updates break these packages, so you have to lock 
them (pkg lock php81-pecl-imagick), and then, after the update, unlock 
them, and manually and forcefully rebuild and reinstall them. If you 
have some self compiled packages, I don't think you can trust a regular 
user with the package update, nor I think you can easily automate this 
part.

Regards,

Balázs

On 1/21/23 20:30, Christoph Harder wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> maybe this question should be extended with "How bulletproof are 
> updates/upgrades?".
>
> I've used FreeBSD as OS for three VPN gateways, but keeping the 
> systems up to date was always a problem.
> Multiple times manual conflict resolution was required. Sometimes 
> remote access to the systems failed while/after an update, causing 
> downtimes and requiring me to go to the systems.
> Now this might not be a FreeBSD problem, I'm certainly no expert.
> Anyway, the result was, that I generally only did updates when I was 
> near the systems and did updates not as often as I would have liked.
> I did the updates by myself, since anytime a manual conflict 
> resolution would be required none of the other users could do it. 
> Ideally updates/upgrades would be so easy that anybody can do it or 
> that they can be automated.
>
> Now to the actual question. How easy/hard/bulletproof are DragonflyBSD 
> updates/upgrades?
>
> https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/handbook/Upgrading/ looks super 
> easy, but so did the update/upgrade manual of FreeBSD.
>
> Is the upgrade process on Dragonfly BSD easy enough that you could 
> describe the process to a (non-technical) user over the phone?
>
> Best regards,
> Christoph Harder
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