Joachim Schipper wrote:
For instance, OpenBSD 4.0 introduced a warning for large stacks, and 4.0
kernels are compiled with this option. Compiling a pre-4.0 -current on
3.9 is thus impossible.
That's indeed a good example. While there's probably a way around it by
upgrading in several steps, indeed the upgrade could become quite messy
and complicated, and change from release to release.
Other, usually more subtle, problems also exist. Since snapshots are
easy to support and easy to use, they are preferred.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer the binary approach. I'd rather have only
binary upgrades and updates than only upgrades and updates from source.
Again, because there are lots of interdependencies. It's not like you
can get away with using packages for gcc, glibc and binutils on Linux,
for instance. Sure, they'll package them for you, but don't try to make
any other combination than the official...
Well, you could, if your package manager manages dependencies correctly.
OpenBSD's package manager does AFAIK.
However, some things are just that way for historical reasons - it might
be possible to make a package out of Apache 1.3, for instance. (However,
Apache in particular has been changed quite a bit from the 'official'
version.)
Yes, that's probably the main reason.
Thanks for your explanations. Now I'm wondering why FreeBSD maintains
the "upgrade from source" approach, but that's for a different list
(yes, I read that in FreeBSD 6.2 you can do binary upgrades now - but
actually I am not interested in FreeBSD at this point).
Thanks very much for your explanations. I hate it when things don't make
sense to me.
-pu
