Updating FreeBSD to Latest Version with svn

I recently, after a long hiatus from working with FreeBSD, stumbled onto the fact that csup is no longer supported as the mechanism for obtaining the latest copy of the FreeBSD source tree. The new method is via the svn command, part of the subversion package. Make sure subversion is installed.

pkg install subversion

With the previous method, csup was configured via the cvsup files. The pertinent line in the cvsup files looked like this:

*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_8_4

... and if you build and installed this world and kernel, you would end up with a FreeBSD version such as 8.3-RELEASE-p8. Now that supfiles have been eliminated, there is just a single command to run.

svn co svn://svn0.us-west.freebsd.org/base/releng/8.4 /usr/src

... and this would produce sources as such:

dlp-freebsd8# egrep "^BRANCH|^REVISION" /usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh
REVISION="8.4"
BRANCH="RELEASE"

The command works the same way on other versions, 9.0, 9.1, etc etc.

The ports tree is updated the same way.

svn co svn://svn0.us-west.freebsd.org/ports/head /usr/ports

Then later, when its time to update, you just let svn pull down the deltas, as such:

svn update /usr/ports

or

svn update /usr/src