OpenBSD Snapshots

How OpenBSD Snapshots are built:

Binary snapshots are supposed to be easy to use and install. To ease their use, they are always statically linked. Developers have built these distributions by doing

	setenv LDSTATIC -static
	cd /usr/src
	make obj
	make build
	setenv DESTDIR /dir
	make snapshot

If you find a snapshot that is dynamically linked, please inform deraadt@openbsd.org.

In each snapshot, all tar.gz files are rooted at /. If you are a trusting kind of person you can use the following script. However it is suggested that you not blindly install snapshots in this fashion.

	foreach i ( `pwd`/*.tar.gz )
	    ( cd /; tar --unlink zxvpf $i )
	end

The tar program you use must be GNU tar or some other newer posix-compliant version. The tar files contain directory information in a new format, in particular dev.tar.gz contains all sorts of files that an older version of tar would break on. Also, one should be able to use just about any version of pax instead.

But I want dynamic binaries!:

Real Releases, when they are made, will not be statically linked.

If you desire dynamic binaries on your machine, do the following:

	cd /usr/src
	make obj
	make build

This will rebuild your machine's binaries in the normal way. of course, before doing this later step of rebuilding all the binaries on your machine, realize that source code quality can vary from day to day -- on some days the make build might fail and you might run into nasty problems.