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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msunews!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: update to a snap Date: 21 May 1995 08:56:04 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 38 Message-ID: <3pmv74$2ll@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <801015476k70585&1147298525r114@zurich.gcomm.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu In article <801015476k70585&1147298525r114@zurich.gcomm.com>, CaptBly <captbly@zurich.gcomm.com> wrote: >how do you update FreeBSD to one of the newer snaps without loosing >everything?? At this time, you don't. You back up any data you'd like to save and you load the snap from scratch. Now before everyone here screams "But that's utterly BOGUS!!" let me just clarify what the snaps are for! The snaps are not meant to be release-substitutes, though many people use them that way, they're meant to be test releases. For them to be effective test releases, I need to be able to roll them quickly and with a minimum of impact on our mainstream development efforts. I'd love to make the upgrade process work, but it's a piece of technology that's hard to get right and not one among FreeBSD's many thousands of users have stepped forward with a proposed solution. Since we rely on such donations of effort to move forward (we are but a few at the core), it simply hasn't happened yet. Now WRT upgrades between major releases, that's a slightly differerent matter and one I will do my best to address. It's a non-trivial problem, especially when you are adding optimizations to the filesystem code that really _wants_ the user to remake all their filesystems to gain its full benefit (or have completely gone from 32bit to 64bit offsets, as was the case in 1.1 -> 2.0). In the long term, I'd like to be able to codify all the changes between any point release and the next by expressing the changes as "deltas" which could reside in a known location. To upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2.4, the installation mechanism would detect your current release and apply all the intervening deltas. I'd also like the several weeks worth of time this would take to write.. :-) If anyone out there desires to implement such a framework, I would certainly do the release-specific work involved in using it. It should be able to deal with removals, renames, adds and patches. Jordan