# Why No freebsd-update On -STABLE?



## Majorix (Oct 15, 2012)

So people can use freebsd-update to upgrade, from say 9.0-RELEASE to 9.1-RELEASE.

But the tool is not available if you are on -STABLE or -CURRENT. Instead you will have to compile everything yourself, which takes a lot of time on slower computers.

Why is it like that?


----------



## SirDice (Oct 15, 2012)

Because there's no way to tell in what state your version of -STABLE is. If you can't figure that out you can't figure out what changed. Besides that people use clang, GCC 4.6 and what not to compile. This results in vastly different binaries. Again, a difficult point if you need to figure out what the changes are.


----------



## mamalos (Oct 15, 2012)

...maybe they could allow to update to FreeBSD snapshots...

Just my 2 cents...


----------



## Majorix (Oct 15, 2012)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Because there's no way to tell in what state your version of -STABLE is. If you can't figure that out you can't figure out what changed. Besides that people use clang, GCC 4.6 and what not to compile. This results in vastly different binaries. Again, a difficult point if you need to figure out what the changes are.



I believe there is an OS version variable set somewhere, because if you would check /usr/ports/UPDATING you would see by the information about pkgng that it needs OSVERSION >= 1000017 . This makes me think freebsd-update could use this information to see where you are at.

Now with the new package manager pkgng which uses binary packages, I believe it is time the FreeBSD devs checked out the possibility of making freebsd-update available on ALL kinds of FreeBSD's.


----------



## wblock@ (Oct 15, 2012)

-stable is not a fixed version.  The object code I have on my system is different from other -stable systems.  freebsd-update is not made to deal with that, it's made to upgrade from a known binary to another known binary.

buildworld/kernel on FreeBSD is not very painful.  If you want binary upgrades to the operating system, there is a project to use pkgng for the operating system itself.  It's on sourceforge, I think, but don't recall the details.


----------



## kpa (Oct 15, 2012)

Using PKGNG for the base OS would be a very bad idea unless it's restricted in such a way that the base system packages are made incompatible with the packages from ports. You really don't want a base system package depend on a package from ports. Maybe the packages from ports could depend on packages from the base system but not the other way around.


----------



## wblock@ (Oct 15, 2012)

I would expect base system packages (sendmail, ntp, ee, etc) to not have any dependencies on ports at all.  But I haven't tried it, I just like the idea of being able to build a base system to order with packages.


----------

