Missing Pieces

These are things that freebsd-update does or can do, and freebsd-rustdate doesn’t. At least, the ones that are intentional. This basically breaks down into some missing commands, some missing configurability, and some missing special-case handling.

Custom Kernels

No attempt is made to support custom kernels. You couldn’t use freebsd-update straight with that as a rule anyway, since updating src is part of updating world, so it would be too late. You have to be doing manual stuff anyway. And I’ve never tried, so I haven’t tried supporting this.

Rollback

freebsd-rustdate isn’t writing out any of the extra metadata to support a rollback command. We are generally storing the stashed-up copies of existing files like freebsd-update does, so a lot of the data is already present. However, I’m not sure this is super useful in general. For instance, I don’t think from inspection that it will handle rolling back the case of files turning into dirs (or vice versa) correctly, so it’s already a bit questionable.

Manual use of snapshots (on-system in the filesystem, on-hypervisor, etc) or the bectl boot environments (which freebsd-rustdate does support) is probably a better way of handling this anyway…

Config

Some bits of the config file just aren’t used.

• BackupKernelDir and StrictComponents aren’t implemented.
• AllowAdd and AllowDelete are presumed true, so aren’t disable-able.
• BackupKernelSymbolFiles stopped having meaning before 11.0-RELEASE (unless you’re setting weird build params), so isn’t implemented.

Old Version Handling

Various stuff for very old (or at least solidly unsupported-old) stuff isn’t implemented, and isn’t expected to be.

• Special casing collapsing RCS ids (to minimize diffs and conflicts) isn’t implemented, as that happened during the 11->12 transition.
• As mentioned above, the special handling for kernel .debug/.symbols files in 10.x and earlier isn’t implemented.
• Some stuff for even older version I’m not even gonna bother trying to collate.

Mostly, anything notably not applicable to 13+ is likely to be left out.

IDS

freebsd-rustdate doesn’t implement the IDS command of freebsd-update. It does have a check-sys command, which can fill a similar role, but it doesn’t make any attempt to be an IDS-lite, just to be a check-system sorta thing.

Custom Repositories and Components

Very limited testing has been done against custom repositories with significantly differing components from the official public servers. It basically works in the small usage I know of, but that’s a ripe ground for surprises to show up.

In particular, x-ref earlier about custom kernels.