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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."
Yes APT is great. It's easy to use and requires less effort than the FreeBSD upgrade process but it's too bad Debian stable is so hopelessly out of date. FreeBSD isn't. It's a stable operating system with upto date third party software delivered using the ports system. I've said this before and I'll say it again since this Debian comparison has been brought up.... I hear this argument from Debian advocates a lot: "Do you want a stable server or do you want bleeding edge?" Well with FreeBSD I get stable servers and still have packages that aren't a year or two [or sometimes more] old...... it is possible. And before anyone recommends that I run Debian testing instead please remember that the Debian Security team claim that they don't support anything besides the stable releases. I could use a Debian stable system and then mix match packages from unstable or testing and risk instability in the end or higher maintenance due to no security alerts from one source but then why not use FreeBSD instead in the first place?