Re: Reverting -current by date.

On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 10:39 AM bob prohaska <fbsd_at_www.zefox.net> wrote:

> From time to time it would be handy to revert freebsd-current to
> an older, well-behaved revision.
>
> Is there a mechanism for identifying revision numbers that
> will at least compile and boot, by date?
>

Almost all of them will compile. Almost all of those will boot. While some
build breakage sneaks through, the default assumption is that it's good.
That's certainly been my experience randomly updating to -current. There's
some that are more or less performant, mind you, and some that are more or
less stable, it is true. But the overwhelming vast majority will compile
and boot, at least for amd64. I have issues less than 1% of the time when
updating to whatever is current at the moment I fancy an update.

There's some hardware that gets broken from time to time, but we don't
track that specifically. And non-amd64 architectures takes more care and
planning as any build breakage for those platforms lasts longer, in direct
proportion to how popular the platform is....

It's all in the commit logs. If you run -current you need to read them.
They will also tell you almost always if you pick revision X if there was a
subsequent fix that made things compile you should go with.


> In my case buildworld seems to be markedly slower than, say,
> six months ago. Maybe it's hardware, maybe something else. Is
> there a way to pick a revision number to revert to, that's
> better than merely guessing?
>

Study the commit logs? I know I'm harping on that, but when things go
wrong, that's what I do.

Also -DNO_CLEAN builds help a lot if you're worried about it not even
building, though from time to time you run into issues with a NO_CLEAN
build due to a recent commit that wasn't appreciated at the time of the
commit, but was later and fixed.

Warner