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Old 14th April 2009
ax0 ax0 is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2009
Posts: 22
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
FreeBSD and Gentoo are moving targets. For all practical purposes
those are rolling releases operating systems. In practical sense
they work only on i386 and amd64 and they are optimized for speed.
In both cases ports and portages have many knobs that you can turn
on or off to optimize packet to your specific purpose.

OpenBSD is security appliance. It is extremely portable and able to work across the range of different architectures. The best architecture IMHO is sparc64.
It has cascade release cycle (six months like CentOS for instance).
Userland is complete unlike FreeBSD for instance and configure to be as safe as possible out of box.
Ports are add-ons. They are not carefully audited for security and then usually bring whole slue of security issues to the OpenBSD installation.
The ultimate goal of OpenBSD packaging system is reproducibility so that
system stays as safe as possible. Ports are compiled with very conservative options and there are only minor things that can be tuned.
Those are called flavors.

One could argue that compiling things from source using ports on OpenBSD is safer than installing binary tarballs. That is fine. But unless
you back port new versions of the software or port it yourself the ports will compile on identical way for six months. There is no way that you can
use stable OpenBSD as a moving target. If you want that follow current.
Current is IMHO as stable as FreeBSD stable for about 3 months during the
release cycle. However usually in May, June or November and December things might brake as the developers are making major changes to OpenBSD.
can anyone give me some input, also.. i can't find specifically in the faq about updating from generic(release?) to -stable / -current.

any help?



thanks for all the info. hopefully you or someone else can give me some info on updating to -curent branch..
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