The upgrade treadmill continues... FreeBSD 6.0 was announced as available in early November, 2005 and, as reports on stability and performance were good, I decided to upgrade both FreeBSD 5.4 boxes over the Christmas period.
This was the first time I'd upgraded over a major release via cvsup.
Previously I'd performed fresh
binary installs to move from FreeBSD 4.x to 5.x. The standard cvsup method was used,
making sure that the tag setting of *default release=cvs in
/usr/local/etc/cvsup/src-supfile was set to
tag=RELENG_6_0.
The build and install process went as expected. If you have
specified any NOXXX flags in your /etc/make.conf file
(e.g. NOINET6), change them to NO_XXX before you run
buildworld or buildkernel otherwise the processes
will complain about deprecated flags. However, even if the
old-style flags still exist, the build process runs OK.
The mergemaster step is rather painful, as there are so
many new/modified files which have to be accepted.
The other slightly painful, or rather, time-consuming, piece, is
that all the ports need to be re-compiled to ensure that they are
linked against the new FreeBSD 6.0 libraries. This can be achieved
with portupgrade -fa, but on my slow boxes that takes a
long time, even with the small number of ports I have.
