On 28/10/2025 15:29, Marek Zarychta wrote:
W dniu 28.10.2025 o 14:37, Thomas Schweikle pisze:
[..]
Hello Thomas,
that’s splendid - it’s impressive that you’ve managed to upgrade FreeBSD
from version 5.0! FreeBSD truly is an amazing operating system; being
able to upgrade continuously for 25+ years without ever needing to
reinstall is a real achievement. Well done; my oldest installations that
are still being upgraded date back only to the FreeBSD 6.x era.
Anyway, it’s time to say goodbye to mergemaster - you won’t regret it.
Well, I am trying to use etcupdate for at least 2 or 3 years and I
regret it every time. I am taking care of about 20 machines and every
time I need to upgrade them and use etcupdate there are some issues or
at least unnecessary conflicts that I must fix manually. Many time in
file that I never edited. For me personally the mergemaster worked in
much better way.
The FreeBSD Handbook covers this transition in detail [1]. To perform
the upgrade correctly, you should run mergemaster(8) for the last time
under FreeBSD 14, and before rebooting, you’ll also need to run
etcupdate(8) too.
Here’s the sequence that worked for me many times in recent weeks:
# make buildworld
# make buildkernel
# mergemaster
# etcupdate extract
# etcupdate diff
# etcupdate -B
# make installkernel
# make installworld
# reboot
# pkg upgrade
# make delete-old
# make delete-old-libs
bootloader upgrade
# zpool upgrade
# reboot
[..]
