Yo yo yo yo yo yo yooooooooooooooo nixers,

Gotta question about following -current. Today I compiled the source tree and installed it on my machine (despite being told that is a bad idea by multiple sources) to understand the build process for OpenBSD and to generally refresh my brain (I am a returning user). Now, I am perfectly okay with using source and don't mind updating via source, but I was wondering if it is possible to do a binary upgrade from snapshots. Basically what I'm getting at is, even though I'm running a version I compiled, is it possible to go back to binary snaphots just by upgrading, or do I need to reinstall?

Thanks guys

I believe you will be OK, from what I've read, but I'm quite new to OpenBSD.
If no one on here can give you a definitive answer, go to http://daemonforums.org/index.php - some very experienced people on there.

Thanks for the response, bsdkeith. I'll see what the guys over there have to say.

Cheers.

I'm not 100% sure what you want to do, but afaik anything is possible as long as you update. Anything going back in time is explicitly not supported and might break your system. So stable -> snapshot is fine, snapshot -> current is fine, but once you are on current, I believe you are stuck there, at least until one of the other branches overtakes current. I have switched successfully from current to release in the past, but with the current version being older than the release.

Anyway, maybe this will help you: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html#BldBinary

Hey sulami, thanks for the response! I did know the rules on upgrading the whole system, in the way that you explained. I initially ran -RELEASE and then decided to run -CURRENT. So as per the FAQ, I installed the "closest available binary", which was a build of the source tree from -CURRENT (snapshot) and went on from there.

After doing some type of test on my system, I did find the answer to my initial question. I was curious to see if one could do a BINARY upgrade of -CURRENT from a COMPILED upgrade of -CURRENT. Meaning, that I downloaded the source tree, built the ENTIRE system, then installed the binaries that I built. Then, I used a pre-built snapshot to do another upgrade. So, to recap on my upgrade timeline, it looks like this, visually:

5.7-RELEASE -> 5.8-CURRENT #1228 (from snapshot) -> 5.8-CURRENT #0 (from source, hence the #0) -> 5.8-CURENT #1234 (from snapshot)

This change in the version number of -CURRENT (from `uname -a`) has led me to believe that I answered my own question. Also, my system does work fine as a result of this process. sysmerge(8) did report some changed files in /etc, but that is to be expected from -CURRENT.

Thanks again for your responses guys. Cheers.