On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Brent Fulgham wrote: > So what exactly *is* present in Debian that would be at all > helpful?
You can configure apt to have a location for security updates. Then you can use apt to automatcially update the system with new fixes. The basic way to do this with bsd is download the patch(es), go into the source directory, apply the patch, make and then make install. Depending on the situation, you may need to repeat this for each patch or you may be able to just apply all the patches and then do the make at the end. (apt can do this with binary packages -- which can save a day on my 486.) Another way BSD's do fixes is to update the entire packages/ports collection, deinstall the package and then rebuild the package. Does anyone know of a fast (no compiling) and automatic method of retrieving and installing security updates in a BSD that compares with apt? On a slow system (I still use several 486s), binaries (non-source) packages are great. As far as I know and I haven't used any BSD that can figure out dependencies AND automatically download the dependencies as binary (non-source) packages. (It can do it when building from source, though.) If I am wrong, feel free to teach me. FreeBSD does have a portcheckout tool (which I haven't used) that can install a package and its dependencies without having a full and up-to-date /usr/ports tree. (Can anyone explain this? How does it compare with apt-get?) Jeremy C. Reed http://www.reedmedia.net/ http://bsd.reedmedia.net/
