2001-Jan-30

Not NetBSD related, but after reading all the "bind" news, I added the "security.debian.org" APT setting to my apt/sources.list and updated my Debian server. Again I am impressed on how it upgrades a system. It (apt-get) downloaded around 50 packages and installed them. In addition, it helped me change some configurations. It looked at important files and suggested changes; for example removed "ftp" user and group and fixed the "list" user (changed GECOS and directory). I was using "list", so I simply created a new user and group (easylist) and chown/chgrp'd the files to easylist. One other broken thing was lynx started via cron -- so I added "-term=vt100". (On 28/Mar/2001, I noticed another problem: OpenSSH changed behaviour and my backups hadn't worked for two months. See my other diary for 28/Mar/2001.)

I don't think that NetBSD should use dpkg/apt, but it would be useful to have some more automated tools to update a system. I think there is a pkg that looks to update packages. Plus I wrote a script a couple months ago that acts similar to Debian's configuration upgrading tool (http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/netbsd/update_etc/). I need to rename this to "update_conf" or something else.

Still building a release. I learned that you must have DESTDIR and RELEASEDIR both defined. Also, you should do a "make clean" if you mess up or you'll start getting the yacc include errors again. Also the floppies didn't all build because of not enough inodes. Instead of doing a "MAKEDEV ramdisk", I had it just do a few devices and I boosted the "-i" setting for newfs. (These ideas were from -current.) In addition, I commented out the rescue floppy builds.

Also you should use BUILD=1 and UPDATE=1 (avoid cleandir) when simply rebuilding. The UPDATE part wasn't clearly documented in mk.conf(5) manual page or the webpage (Building and Packaging A Release); but documented directly in the Makefile. *I need to send-pr this.*