Hi,
as an addendum to Jason Crawford's answer to your mail, also note that
there is a nice release(8) man page. Since going from -release to
-stable doesn't involve any of the manual steps like upgrading from
release to release or release/-stable to -current, things are really
straightforward - no surprises and only very little to do wrong.
The way things are on OpenBSD, it is just as manageable as any other OS,
except it's a bit different and some infrastructure makes it simple and
fast - like a build box.
Markus Wernig wrote:
[getting rid of unneeded services, completely]
low on disk space). It's probably more a question of mindset. Up to now
I was used to controlling which software went on my system and which
didn't.
You are not relinquishing this control on OpenBSD either; there are
knobs that make it relatively easy to make highly customized
releases.(*) However, since OpenBSD needs to be taken as a whole --
kernel, userland, ports tree and X11 -- pushing these knobs will leave
you with something that isn't OpenBSD anymore. One of the core points of
the *BSDs is to have an operating system, whose components work together
without being completely independent.
Sometimes, in very rare and/or special cases, it may be worth giving up
running "supported OpenBSD". However, a certain mindset whose only
result is not wanting to spend 2MB (give or take) of diskspace for a
perfectly integrated httpd and named that aren't running nor doing
anything bad anyways is most likely not a good reason and not worth the
trouble. So ... you'll get over it. ;-)
Moritz
*: That is, when it's about taking things away from or changing things
inside the OS. To add stuff, you don't need to go through that trouble -
instead, read up on ``siteXY.tgz''.
