Re: upgrade to -stable

["STeve Andre'" <andres@msu.edu>]

On Monday 15 September 2003 09:57 pm, Gëzim wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> Sometime ago I made some notes (for myself) on how to
> upgrade to -stable from
> http://www.openbsd.org/stable.html , they are as
> follows:
[snip]
> #REBUILDING THE BINARIES
> cd /usr/src
> rm -r /usr/obj/*
> make obj && make build
>
> I find this process loonnnggg. My question today is
> that do I have to do every step everytime I upgrade to
> -stable, or are some of the steps just to be done one
> time?
>
> Thanks you,
> Gëzim

It's possible to take some shortcuts when rebuilding the world
but you have to have a good idea of what you're doing, because
you can mess things up easily.

My first suggestion is to always use script(1) when doing the cvs
update.   This lets you keep track of what you've just gotten.  I
always do this, living in the -current world as I do on my laptop.

If you see that ONLY parts of userland have changed you don't 
have to rebuild the kernel.  So if what you pulled down is just
something in usr.bin for example, you're safe from having to 
recompile the kernel.  If the changes are in sys/kern, I don't think
there is a need to recompile userland, but this quickly gets into
the gray area of libraries.  I don't know all the nuances of 'where'
they all are (userland vs kernelland), so I try not to be clever
and just rebuild everything.

My first machine that I did this on was a ThinkPad 1480i at 466MHz
so I know about slow.  The best thing would be to arrange your
compiling for when you don't need the computer, like when you 
sleep.  In general, I don't recommend "clever" things, because once
you think you're clever something rises up and nips you in the ass.
I'll also point out that you will incur the rath of developers if you
submit a bug report which leads people to look at a non-existant
problem.

--STeve Andre'