Re: Proposal to modify behavior of installworld

[John Marino <dragonflybsd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/12/2013 18:46, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>
>      So I would propose that the world-backup mechanic be a manual target
>      and not an automatic process.  e.g. like:
>
> 	make backupworld
> 	make restoreworld
>
>      I do not think it would be a good idea to automatically backup the world
>      when doing an installworld because of the issue of potentially doing
>      multiple installworlds of unstable source and having your backup get
>      blown away.
>
>      However, the buildworld/installworld targets *COULD* warn you when
>      there is no backup or the backup is very old (like over a month old)
>      and suggest that you make a backup via the backupworld target before
>      installing.
>

Hi Matt,
I have implemented this proposal in commit 
7bee86c0ec635f688e37b15e7aa203a961ec4c84

There are 3 new make.conf parameters now:
WORLD_BACKUP - location to store backed up world binaries
                default = /var/backups/world_binaries
DAYS_BACKUP  - The number of days since the last backup that must
	       pass before "make installworld" fails with an error
                default = 28
NO_BACKUP    - defining this will prevent backup checks.


For those using UFS filesystems, there's a good chance the /var 
partition isn't big enough because the default partition size is pretty 
small.  They will likely want to define WORLD_BACKUP.

This world backup behavior is on by default.  Defining NO_BACKUP will 
keep the original behavior.

John