I've written setup scripts (took a while though) for my different systems which will never be as quick as the upgrade process but I've got it reasonably quick and means I can keep moving forward like the openbsd project does, switch between current, stable and snapshots without a sudden need to spend time on an unexpected install, whilst keeping clean systems, reduce cross contamination (though more likely a concern in firefox profile etc.). It also means I can run tests easily and setup remote servers with less upload time, the sysmerge code helped me, thanks go to "ajacoutot".
p.s. I did some speed comparisons using apachebench and apache on i386 and amd64. I only have one fairly old amd64 system at the mo and plan on more testing later on the server hardware when I have more demand on my server. I found i386 way outperformed amd64 and was going to publish the results, but i386 won on every aspect so theres not much point and I will try other newer hardware to confirm at some point. I also found whilst the requests per second stayed the same for 4.6 to 4.7 (web page) the throughput doubled (cpu bottlenecked). KeV
