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Painlessly Update FreeBSD
boarder8925 writes "Over at BSDnews, Steve Wingate has written an article on how to easily update FreeBSD. Wingate begins his article by saying, "One of the greatest advantages that *BSD has over other Unix variants is the cvsup/make world process. Unlike most Linux distributions it isn't necessary to wait months for a new version to be released for you to upgrade your system. The cvsup/make world process allows you to update your system at any time. I'm going to show you how to make the process as painless as possible." The article discusses the following: installing CVSup, choosing a cvsup server, configuring make.conf, and, finally, performing the upgrade. The piece is also available as a .pdf file."
There's also cvsync, which is a good cvsup alternative, written in C.
The only issue with gentoo is the lack of a central binary repository like the redhat channels system (official anyway - chinstrap is decent for those willing to stray). It was discussed at great length several months ago and decided not to be created despite having the backend infrastructure already in place. The great advantage of gentoo, and in a way the failure of bsd (and pretty much every commercial linux) is the ability to choose complex compile and build options with ease. For this same reason and the fact a binary repository could never handle a fraction of the possibilities it was never created :(.
If however you consider implementing gentoo in a work environment with say 10-100 systems they could all be set to use a central compile server to your organisation or/and through distcc compile kickass fast!
Although installs of gentoo are a pain (hopefully better if the installer gets built) it is by far the easiest to update, and customise of any linux.
And (big + for me) none of the bs of no or modified media players, browsers, burner software etc of suse, redhat or mandrake because of cautios legal practises. I've been finding more and more things i like about the portage system the more i use it. Any new reasonably popular package seems to make it on the tree in less than a day. If their is a piece of software that isnt on the tree u need (happened to me once) u can either find or make a ebuild and submit it for inclusion in the tree
My Conclusions
Ms Windows - ah get it away from me!!!! Evil
Redhat/Suse/Mandrake - Better but canabalises some stuff and out of date packages
The BSD Trio - Stable, fast, easy update, and faster update due to binary
Gentoo - Stable, fast, easy update and more customizable due to all source (usually)
I was scanning this... Got 1/2 way through and was wondering if he stole it, cause I swore i read it somewhere.
Then I realized: Issue #3?November 9, 2003
How the hell is this news? I love FreeBSD, its all I use. the only thing dead about it is bsd.slashdot.org