Hi,
I'm a complete newbie on BSD(although i have substantial linux knowledge) and i was reading the faq on OpenBsd3.5 and I understand there is a release version and a patch branch which is the same as release but with patches applied to it. Now, from what i understand to get the patch branch you have to do compilation yourself, and at this point i was trying to use binaries only, which means that I will have to use the release version. And that's ok, but what I wanted to know is if there is a way of getting the patched packages, what would remove the need for compilation.
I found there is the errata page(http://www.openbsd.org/errata.html) and the packages errata(http://www.openbsd.org/pkg-stable.html), but I'm confused on the connection between the two. Are the packages errata, the packages already with the patches on the errata page(http://www.openbsd.org/errata.html), or are they different? In the errata page it says For important packages updates, please refer here(http://www.openbsd.org/pkg-stable.html). Does this mean the package errata has only some of the patches?

Or are they different?
Is there any other way to install the patches not by compilation?

Thanks.

Well there is a patch branch in CVS, or you could just download the patch diffs and apply those manually, then recompile the affected portion of code. For the CVS patch branch you would have to check out the entire tree. In theory, if you were applying patch diffs manually you would only need to check out that section of code (for instance if the patch applied to cvs, you would--in theory--only need to checkout src/gnu/usr.bin/cvs).

Of course, it's not recommended to try to short-circuit things like that and it's certainly not guaranteed to work. For packages in the ports tree there aren't really patch diffs, because ports compile from source any way you'll already have the source. The ports tree also has the patch branch and so you would just cvs up the patch branch of ports, uninstall the affected port, and recompile it.

The OpenBSD team does not put out binary patch updates. The only binary updates they put out are snapshots of the current source. Since OpenBSD current is supposed to always build, it's usually pretty safe. That being said, newly comitted stuff does not always work perfectly, so if you're updating a production system you shouldn't use snapshots.

There are a couple of tools that other people have put out to let you compile a binary update for yourself. However, this assume that you have more than one machine of the same architecture so you build it on one machine and install on others. If you have only one machine, it wouldn't make any sense since you still have to compile.

The process for compiling OpenBSD from source and keeping it up to date is very well documented and very straight-forward. Unless you have a 386 that would take forever to compile something, I don't see the problem. Heck, I even patch my SPARCstation5/70 and it doesn't take that long. You can safely compile in the background while the machine runs normally. I think the longest it ever took was 16hrs, but it kept functionally normally during the whole patch build.

Well, thanks for the replie, chort. I'll follow the instruccions on updating from source.
Hopefully it won't give me any problems.