Description Alan Somers 2021-03-03 16:48:05 UTC

freebsd-update works quite well in tandem with boot environments.  When doing minor upgrades (e.g. 12.0 -> 12.1), I can complete the entire upgrade in the BE and then boot into an upgraded system.  But it's a little less convenient when doing major upgrades, because one must do "freebsd-update install" a final time after reinstalling ports, which must happen after the reboot.  The sequence looks like this:

# bectl create 13.0-BETA3
# bectl mount 13.0-BETA3
# freebsd-update -b /tmp/whatever -d /tmp/whatever/var/db/freebsd-update upgrade -r 13.0-RELEASE
# freebsd-update -b /tmp/whatever -d /tmp/whatever/var/db/freebsd-update install
# freebsd-update -b /tmp/whatever -d /tmp/whatever/var/db/freebsd-update install
# reboot
# pkg update
# pkg upgrade
# freebsd-update install

It's easy to accidentally forget the "-d" argument.  If you do that, then the final "freebsd-update install" won't work, and the only remedy is to revert to the old boot environment and try again.

I propose that freebsd-update's workdir should default to
${BASEDIR}/var/db/freebsd-update .  That would eliminate the need to specify "-d" in most cases, and it would be backwards compatible with the common use case where "-b" is not specified.