On 2011-07-11, Miguel Almeida wrote:
> Hello all. This is the first time I'm posting to this mailing list so I'll
> briefly introduce myself: I'm Miguel Almeida, I live in Portugal, I work as an
> independent consultant, I've been using OpenBSD for less than a year (on two
> of my own servers) and, well, to end this short intro, I'll say I've (almost)
> completed 40 laps around the sun : )
>
> This being said, the doubt I have regarding the OpenBSD packages is this: (and
> yes, I've read the FAQ)
>
> The context, as I understand it:
>
> - The development and porting teams update the base system and the ports in
> the current and stable branches, and this effort includes, among other things,
> updating these trees whenever a security update is required;
>
> - This work includes updating two stable branches (e.g. if the last release is
> 4.9, both 4.9-stable and 4.8-stable will be updated); and
>
> - The packages are built from the ports tree and may be also updated if a
> security vulnerability is found.
>
> My question is this: as I've seen that some packages built for 4.8 and 4.9
> have different version numbers - even after using pkg_add -u - should I assume
> that in order to keep the packages up to date I should _always_ upgrade to the
> latest release and follow stable? Or, alternatively, should I adopt the
> ports-stable method for installing and managing third-party software instead
> of using packages altogether?
>
> Thank you very much in advance for your reply (!)
> Best regards
> -- Miguel
>
>
There are no official binary packages built from -stable ports,
if you want these I suggest setting up a build server and using dpb
(see dpb(1); use "man -M /usr/ports/infrastructure/man dpb" on 4.9)
to produce your own packages.
-stable ports *only* covers the latest release.