Re: Fast releases demand binary updates.. (Was: Release schedule for 2006)

Joe Rhett wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 12:04:05AM -0700, Scott Long wrote:
>>There will be three FreeBSD 6 releases in 2006.
> 
> While this is nice, may I suggest that it is time to put aside/delay one
> release cycle and come up with a binary update mechanism supported well by
> the OS?  Increasing the speed of releases is good.  Increasing the number
> of deployed systems out of date because there are no easy binary upgrade
> mechanisms is bad.
> 
> It has been bad, it's getting worse.

YMMV.  I burned a 6.0 release from the ISO image, and did a binary upgrade on an
IBM ThinkPad (T.34? maybe), which worked perfectly.  All of the 5.x binaries,
including X11, KDE, printing, Mozilla, etc worked just fine.

Upgrading the ports from there was somewhat annoying, as this guy's machine had
~400 or so, but deleting them all, and then using "pkg_add -r " works just fine
if you want to grab the latest current binaries.  From there you can portupgrade
as usual.

Now, if you want to talk about upgrading to intermediate patch releases, you've
got a valid point there.  :-)

-- 
-Chuck