Switching DistroWatch over to FreeBSD - AMA
reddit / BSD

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arttic00 · 2020-01-14 06:39

The website?

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jaypatelani · 2020-01-14 06:57

Yes.

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arttic00 · 2020-01-14 07:08

Sweet, what prompted the change?

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jaypatelani · 2020-01-14 07:10

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/eodhit/switching_distrowatch
_over_to_freebsd_ama/fecggue

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flexibeast · 2020-01-14 08:11

> Whenever we'd upgrade between Debian versions a bunch of stuff would
break or need to be re-written.

Can you give some examples of when this happened?

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jaypatelani · 2020-01-14 09:07

Hi Happy cake day :). Can you ask OC on linked thread he can answer
better there.

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[deleted] · 2020-01-14 18:10

Are you splitting things into jails? Any details about how things are
configured you can share with us that might be interesting. Are you
doing configuration management?

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daemonpenguin · 2020-01-14 18:53

We're not using jails or anything special for configuration
management. That would be a bit of overkill for a single web server.

I don't think we did anything particularly odd or interesting with the
server. One of the appeals of FreeBSD was that it was pretty close to
how we wanted things to work out-of-the-box. Apart from creating some
boot environments early on and setting up symbolic links to avoid
breaking old Bash scripts, we didn't do much.

One of the few notable quirks we ran into is BSD sed and GNU sed work
quite a bit differently. We ended up installing GNU sed to get several
scripts to work and then doing a find/replace on the scripts to use
the GNU version.

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sigzero · 2020-01-14 19:26

It's not just sed. If FreeBSD can install the GNU coreutils, that gets
you closer. I'd try to do it the BSD way though.

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daemonpenguin · 2020-01-14 21:18

So far it has been the only component we faced an issue with. In this
case it seemed easiest to install GNU sed and update the scripts
rather than re-work the sed expressions. If we run into more
incompatibilities we might convert the scripts more heavily, but this
way seems most portable for now.

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nukem996 · 2020-01-14 23:37

What was the reasons for switching to FreeBSD?