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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

Aawww, I just upgraded my home server from 11.1 to 11.2, now I have to do it again? Fortunately, upgrading FreeBSD is a lot more convenient these days than it used to be.

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> I just upgraded my home server from 11.1 to 11.2, now I have to do it again?

You don't have to do anything. As with other software, FreeBSD supports multiple releases. 11.2 is still a supported version, and 11.x will be supported until the year 2021.

See this page for more info: https://www.freebsd.org/security/

> Fortunately, upgrading FreeBSD is a lot more convenient these days than it used to be.

Agreed. freebsd-update has made life so much easier.

FreeBSD 11.2 continues to be a supported release. There's no need to upgrade at this point. Also, from experience, unsupported FreeBSD releases generally continue to work as well as they did while they were supported (which is to say, pretty well); they don't turn into a pumpkin when support stops.

I was half joking. When I first got to know FreeBSD, the way to upgrade was to rebuild from source and then perform all kind of magic incantations to merge the new configuration files and whatnot. freebsd-update(8) has made this whole experience much more convenient. I consider myself a competent Unix user, but I am glad these days I do not need to be a wizard to keep things working.

I guess I will upgrade my trusty home server over the holidays, and I am looking forward to it. ;-)

FWIW, I just upgraded my VPS today, using freebsd-update(8), worked like a charm.

The problem is when the packages disappear from the mirrors. Even if you're ok with running older and possibly insecure packages, it makes it more difficult to update. Best to just keep with the supported versions and avoid the headaches.

Put the finishing touches on my NAS build on Thursday, saw 12.0 was in RC3, decided to check the release schedule, and held off getting too deep into the setup ;)

Kind of an odd use-case here but I have a NVMe SSD that I'm using as a scratch drive and it might be nice to have ports on that drive rather than my main drive. Is there a way to move just the ports and symlink it back into /usr, or do I have to move the whole /usr directory and alter fstab?

you can definitely move ports around and symlink it (source: I've done it a bunch)

I've also had /usr/ports as part of a compressed zfs dataset so that might be worth looking at.

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