CVSup, Mounting, Ports and Init on FreeBSD

LiquidPC writes: "OSNews is running an article describing CVSup, mounting, ports, and the FreeBSD init system; focused primarily towards new users to FreeBSD."

FreeBSD Configuration

[NWT]

So you've taken the first step and installed FreeBSD
Yes! The article is really well written and couvers the various topics how to install/update and configure software. It's not really in-depth but it's a good mixture of descripiton and examples. I've been searching for an article like this for a long time and this one is really good as it explains cleary what you do.

Re:FreeBSD Configuration

[Pierre]

This is a great article if you've just installed FreeBSD and are trying to get your feet wet, but I've been searching for an artical on what to do next.

So by default the CDROM is root only. What is the best way to change that?

CVSup and you have the latest edition of the source. For the base system that is great just make buildworld then make installworld

What about the apps I've added. What is the best way to keep those current? Does portupgrade recompile the app everytime?

After cvsup I used to do a

cd /var/db/pkg
portupgrade *

and just leave for a day or so... Can I just upgrade the binaries somehow instead of recompiling?

Maybe it'll be a series of articles!

Re:FreeBSD Configuration

[taion]

Regarding portupgrade, there's no need to run it from /var/db/pkg, and it's suggested that you simply run portupgrade -ra to update everything.

This recompiles and reinstalls all ports for which the installed version is lower than that in the ports library.

You can also specify to portupgrade that it should only use packages, as well as various other options (man portupgrade for a more detailed account).

It's recommended, however, that you install and upgrade ports from source. With a properly configured /etc/make.conf, the code will be optimized specifically for your system and thus run faster, and the ports from CVS tend to be more up-to-date than corresponding packages.

Re:FreeBSD Configuration

[taion]

pkg_add -r <port name> will install the latest version of the package of the specified port, if one is available.

In addition, portupgrade only recompiles packages that have a version change, and the ports in the ports library compile off of released versions of the source (i.e. version x.y,z_w), not from the CVS repositories --- if the only difference between a new release of some hideously large port (X or Mozilla, for instance; GNOME is actually a meta-port, or a collection of ports, none of which take particularly long to build, really) and the older release is a comment change, well... blame the developers, not the porters (:

In addition, especially for larger ports, most minor changes to the port (such as changing the locations of distribution files and whatnot) do not affect the PORTREVISION, so they will not be recompiled either.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD may be dead, but that's not stopping it from rocking at its own wake!

Ports diffs

[more fool you]

When downloading the source files it would be really sweet to just download diffs of the packages, esp. the larger ones (mozilla, XFree86 etc), just like what is done with the kernel source.

Re:Ports diffs

[bovinewasteproduct]

Since the FreeBSD project does not maintain the CVS trees of the ports (if they are even in CVS), this would be a little hard.

What the project does do is maintain the FreeBSD specific diffs so you can just use the original source instead of a custom FreeBSD one.

For selected programs (ie the ones in the contrib tree) the project does keep the tree so you can just get the diffs.

BWP