Re: sysupgrade in src?

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 08:21:00AM +0000, nia wrote:
> There's been a few discussions over the years about the need for a
> usable-over-ssh binary upgrade tool for NetBSD, but they haven't gone
> very far.

I don't object to your idea (and I have never used it).

My own prefered method requires none of what you mentioned though (and
I'm open for suggestions to improve it):

 (1) manually update the kernel (and modules if needed), reboot
 (2) run the already installed sysinst and select "Upgrade" and then 
     "currently running system"
 (3) manually run etcupdate

I have been considering to add a sysinst option to do (1), but it only
is as straight forward as it sounds if you have no special boot setup.
I would be interested to see how sysupgrade deals with that (and my
guess is it won't work for most of my own machines).

Properly doing (3) from within sysinst would be doable, but I personally find
me tricking around and restarting over and over untill it is all good, and
I don't like the "forced path" feeling when doing this inside a script or
utility.

I have also considered to make sysinst replace itself by the upgraded newer
sysinst during step (2), passing over all state collected so far so it is
not very noticable by the user - but we did not have really critical changes
in sysinst for the post-binary-extraction phase recently (one might be
upcoming that deals with the entroyp setup, I will reconsider this idea
then).

Martin