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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: bj@staff.cc.purdue.edu (Ben Jackson)
Subject: Re: Upgrading just binaries to 1.1.5.1?
Sender: news@mozo.cc.purdue.edu (USENET News)
Message-ID: <CsuMs5.qt3@mozo.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 1994 22:36:05 GMT
References: <LEWIKK.94Jul9205222@grasshopper.aud.alcatel.com> <knight.4.00099DA4@caboom.zko.dec.com>
Organization: Purdue University
Lines: 35

In article <knight.4.00099DA4@caboom.zko.dec.com>,
Dave Knight <knight@caboom.zko.dec.com> wrote:
>
>A number of such requests have been made (apparently without answers, from 
>what I can see in the group) and I'm asking as well.
>
>My perusal of the various install documents "implies" that if I just do a 
>reinstall from floppies and then install the bin_tgz.xx files that I'll have 
>effectively upgraded from 1.1 to 1.1.5.1. Is this true? Will this do a "fresh" 
>installation, therefore wiping out everything in my current 1.1 environment, 
>or will this just upgrade over the existing environment leaving the remainder 
>of my already set up goodies intact?

If you've got FreeBSD installed already, there's no need to bother with
install floppies (with one caveat, see below).  The install floppies
should only be necessary the first time you install the OS, since you
have to solve the chicken-egg problem (how do you write create a
filesystem without before you install the OS?).

On the other hand, you should probably boot of some partition other
than your normal root (where you'll be extracting the distribution),
otherwise you'll end up getting EBUSY on several files (including
/sbin/init, /usr/bin/tar, /usr/bin/zcat, libc.so.1.x ...)

If you're asking about running 1.1.5 binaries without the 1.1.5 kernel,
it is possible because I'm doing it (after unpacking the 1.1.5
distribution, I found that the kernel panics my machine regularly).

BTW, after you install over your current files, you'll probably want to
go back and deleted outdated shared libraries (libs with older minor
revs).  Don't delete older major revs, since existing binaries you may
have will depend on them.  Shared libraries have names of the format
libXXX.so.MAJOR.MINOR.

--Ben