Staying up to Date

-as of Thu Dec 27 18:12:26 CET 2012-

Once you have Plan 9 installed, you'll probably want to keep your installation up to date with respect to the changes that come out of the labs. Assuming you have decent network access, the easiest way to do this is to use replica/pull.

The instructions on this page assume you are updating a server or standalone machine with x86 architecture. For a standalone ARM computer such as the Raspberry Pi, read this page for background and then see Updating an ARM system.

UPDATING

To update your system, a script named 'pull' is available and is located in the directory '/usr/glenda/bin/rc' (user glenda's home directory). Note that this script assumes you are using the kfs(4) file system, which nowadays is not likely to be the case. If your system uses fossil(4), see the next paragraph below.

To execute the 'pull' script, just type:

pull

Your system will be updated and you should see the files which are updated scrolling down your window. If you do not have the pull script installed, see the instructions below for your filesystem type.

For more information, see replica(1).

When the update is finished, old versions of binary files in /bin and /bin/*/ will have been renamed by prefixing with an underscore character. These can safely be deleted.

Pull uses the file server sources.cs.bell-labs.com. You can poke around by running:

9fs sources
cd /n/sources
lc

FOSSIL

To update your fossil file system, you can usually just run the following command:

replica/pull -v /dist/replica/network

The -v option puts pull in verbose mode, allowing you to see the current activity it is performing. This is useful if you're interested in seeing what's being updated, but can produce lots of output, so it's best to run it in a scrolling window or omit the -v.

Note that replica/pull takes care not to overwrite local changes, and flags conflicts with error messages so that you can resolve them by hand.

If you have done local modifications, pull will not overwrite the changed file if an update occurs on sources. Use

pull -s path/to/file
(where 'path/to/file' is the absolute path without the leading /) to get the server-version of the specified file, or subtree if 'file' is a directory, where in contrast -c keeps the client-version. Be aware of running 'pull -s/' which specifies the server-version of all files, as local configuration files may be updated undesirably. You can do a "dry run" using the -n option, which will print the list of files which would be updated but not perform the actual update.

OTHER ACCESS

You can also get access to the bleeding-edge sources and extra software by typing:

9fs sources
ls /n/sources

In case you don't have a Plan 9 network connection, you can always download the nightly CD image from the download page and use it to update.

mount /srv/9660 /n/dist /tmp/plan9.iso

If you burned a CD with the unpacked image, the steps are

9660srv
mount  /srv/9660 /n/dist /dev/sdD0/data
replica/pull -v /dist/replica/cd

assuming you have the CDROM drive as the master on the second IDE controller.

SEE ALSO

Updating an ARM system, Sources repository, replica(1)