# Reinstalling Ports After Minor Version Upgrade Necessary?



## spomerg (May 6, 2014)

Hello,

I'm upgrading a FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE system to FreeBSD 9.4-RELEASE via the freebsd-update utility, following the instructions at the manual:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html (Section 23.2.3.2)

Section 23.2.3.3 describes rebuilding ports after a *major* version upgrade. Even though I'm upgrading only a *minor* version, I got a message to rebuild all installed ports after the 2nd invocation (after the reboot) of `freebsd-update install`.

Is this necessary? I have 205 installed ports on this system and don't want to take the time to do this, if I don't have to.  :\ (Though I WILL if I have to  )


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## kpa (May 6, 2014)

*Re: Reinstalling Ports After Minor Version Upgrade Necessary*

You mean 8.3 to 8.4? No, you absolutely don't have to recompile installed ports when going from one minor version to the next higher one. FreeBSD has something called a stable ABI that guarantees that binaries compiled on earlier minor version will continue to work on higher ones assuming everything else (shared libraries installed by ports) has remained the same


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## spomerg (May 6, 2014)

*Re: Reinstalling Ports After Minor Version Upgrade Necessary*



			
				kpa said:
			
		

> You mean 8.3 to 8.4? No, you absolutely don't have to recompile installed ports when going from one minor version to the next higher one. FreeBSD has something called a stable ABI that guarantees that binaries compiled on earlier minor version will continue to work on higher ones assuming everything else (shared libraries installed by ports) has remained the same



Great, I will take your word for it. Thanks for the info.  :beer 

Yes, you are correct: 8.3 to 8.4.


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