On Mon, Nov 29, 2021 at 08:36:42AM +0100, Sebastien Marie wrote: > On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 10:58:38PM -0700, Theo de Raadt wrote: > > (2) who don't recognize they can always reinstall and > > Reinstalling means "choose the files you want to keep" vs "choose the > files you want to remove". Both have pros and cons.
If you're in a situation where restoring configuration and user data after a re-install, either of the same or a more recent OpenBSD version, is a significant burden then you've already got a potential problem looming in the background. 100% of our production machines and servers are updated to each new OpenBSD version by re-install. This includes compiling any and all required ports from source. I can't remember the last time any particular machine required more than six hours, including time to either image the main system disk or physically replace it with another unit. If you keep the OpenBSD installation separate from user data, I.E. on a different physical disk, upgrade by re-installation becomes very easy. Just backup the entire installation to a partition on the user data disk, and do a fresh install on the system disk. Then mount the backup that you just made, copy and manually update any custom configuration that you had previously. Since we build all of our packages from source, often with local modifications to the makefiles, we tend to download the relevant source files first and check that the custom builds complete successfully on a scratch machine the day before we start the real updates. This also has the advantage that we can easily downgrade back to a clean install of a previous version if it ever became necessary for testing or other reasons.
