Introducing sysbuild and sysupgrade

If you are like me and do not like repeating manual tasks over and over again, you probably have written custom scripts to rebuild NetBSD from source and to upgrade your NetBSD installation to a new build. I have had such scripts for years, but they have always been very rudimentary, inflexible and unreliable. What's more: every NetBSD machine I have today has its own custom versions of these scripts, often with little incompatible tweaks to accomodate every installation.

I was now facing the time to rebuild my NetBSD development box (because its VM disk is running out of space), and the thought of having to reconfigure my environment to perform periodic NetBSD builds, and to have to continue using my deficient custom upgrade script gave me the energy to sit down and write decent versions of these two tools. The results of such efforts are sysbuild and sysupgrade, and their goal is to trivialize rebuilds and upgrades.

sysbuild, currently available in pkgsrc/sysutils/sysbuild, automates the process of fetching the NetBSD sources from a CVS repository and performing a build for one or more platforms. The process is defined by a configuration file that controls the parameters of the build, and building a new snapshot from scratch is as easy as issuing one parameter-less command. A companion sysbuild-user package configures an unprivileged system user to perform nightly builds of NetBSD from cron, which is very convenient for developers tracking NetBSD-current. My other post "Introducing sysbuild for NetBSD" and the sysbuild(1) manual page provide more details.

sysupgrade, currently available in pkgsrc/sysutils/sysupgrade, automates the process of bringing a NetBSD system up to date by using a collection of distribution sets (which can come from either sysbuild, your manual builds or a public FTP site). This tool does not have any upgrade knowledge of its own: it is "just" a script for the manual procedure of fetching the distribution sets, upgrading the kernel, unpacking the sets and upgrading /etc with the standard etcupdate and postinstall. My other post "Introducing sysupgrade for NetBSD" and the sysupgrade(8) manual page provide more details.

The tools are released under a typical permissive 3-clause BSD license. I have opted to place them in pkgsrc instead of the base system to give the tools some mileage and to make them immediately available to older releases and operating systems. However, my end goal for these tools (specially sysupgrade) is to end up being part of the NetBSD base system: I find it unfortunate that the base system does not provide a mechanism to upgrade itself to a newer release.

Enjoy the tools and please share your feedback!

... just keep in mind that these are fresh new code so obscure bugs may be lingering around. Hint: Run the included test suites to get some confidence in the implementation before running the tools.