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
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