[wplug-bsd] overzealous upgrade all the way to CURRENT?

Duncan Hutty dhutty+wplug-bsd at ece.cmu.edu
Thu Mar 10 13:58:00 EST 2005


Further tales of Duncan's dabblings with the Beastie-5.3:

I thought compiling a new kernel might fall under the category of 
'everybody should do this'. So I copied and modified GENERIC taking out 
some things that even I could tell weren't necessary.

I had read somewhere that sparc64 rejected older teachings and followed 
the new way of the kernel, per the HB's instructions:
cd /usr/src && make buildkernel KERNCONF=<MINE>

Returning some significant time later I discovered to my disappoinment 
that it failed to build me a new kernel.

So I poked around various lists in some of the dimmer corners of the 
web, where I heard tell of make buildworld as a required precursor to 
make buildkernel. Naively, I believed these rumours. Again, the wait, 
but being somewhat of a gentooista, I'm used to that and find other 
things to do.

When I return, uname -a does not return a nice happy FreeBSD-5.3-STABLE 
<MINE> string, but instead includes the scary FreeBSD-6.0-CURRENT. And 
thinking to myself that there be dragons there, I remember being warned 
off CURRENT in just about every document I've ever seen about FreeBSD.

Thus I beseech you with these humble questions:
Have I indeed upgraded my system to 6.0-CURRENT? Or is uname confusing me?
What should I have verified beforehand to ensure that this didn't happen 
in the first place?
What led it to such a dramatic change anyway? Was it the contents of my 
supfile? I wasn't too confident about the difference between the tag and 
release parameters.
Given that this is to be a stable, barely touched once it has been set 
up kind of box, is it possible to downgrade?

Duncan Hutty


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