Honest question: what is the big deal about syspatch? I see OpenBSD folks talk about it as if it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. How is this different from what many distributions have had for more than a decade in the form of apt or yum?
It's not revolutionary, just very convenient. It's automatic, and I think M:Tier offers a similar service.[0]
> How is this different from […] apt or yum?
It's a "utility for security and reliability binary updates to the base system."[1] Syspatch is only for base system, not ported packages.
[0]: https://stable.mtier.org/ [1]: https://www.openbsd.org/61.html [2]: Package Management https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html
In some ways, the BSDs are just catching up to Linux in terms of update distribution mechanism. They all have a history of being self-hosting compile-from-source systems, and some greybeards are still pretty attached to that idea.
As someone who discovered Linux first and happily used it for many years before discovering the BSDs, I think there's a lot Linux gets right that BSDs will or should adopt to be relevant. (There are also many things the BSDs get right, of course.) This is a good example of that.
But IMO there's nothing wrong with freebsd-update.
"Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask yourself, 'Why was it put there in the first place?'" G.K. Chesterton
With the BSDs, you didn't even have the option of binary updates or packages until quite recently.
(sort of)