[HEADS UP] freebsd-update issues in 10.1
18 December, 2014 by security-officer@FreeBSD.org | freebsd
Dear FreeBSD community, As many of you have noticed, running freebsd-update on FreeBSD 10.1 amd64 systems produces unexpected results, including reinstalling the 32-bit compatibility libraries (lib32) on systems where they are not installed and claiming to want to remove the root directory. When FreeBSD 10.1 was released, the lib32 component was inadvertantly left out of the baseline used to generate freebsd-update patches. The consequences are twofold: first, users upgrading from 10.0 to 10.1 would lose lib32; and second, users who had either installed 10.1 from scratch or manually reinstalled lib32 after freebsd-update removed it would not receive patches for it. When this issue was discovered, we were faced with two options: either ignore it or use the next update to re-add lib32. The latter was considered the lesser of two evils, as it was the only way to ensure that lib32 receives security updates. An unfortunate side effect is that freebsd-update will now recreate lib32 even on systems where it was intentionally left out or removed. Users who do not wish to have lib32 installed should replace "world" with "world/base" on the "Components" line in /etc/freebsd-update.conf. The second issue, attempting to remove '/', seems to be the consequence of a bug in the freebsd-update build process which we do not yet fully understand, but which results in an incorrect index for the lib32 component. We hope to be able to correct this (at the latest) when we next publish an advisory. In the meantime, the error can safely be ignored, as freebsd-update will not actually remove anything. Users who have disabled lib32 in /etc/freebsd-update.conf as described above are not affected. DES