Package updates for -stable branch now available for amd64, i386 soon

In a very welcome development, Solene Rapenne (solene@) announced that binary package updates for the most popular platforms will be available for the latest OpenBSD release.

The announcement reads:

The OpenBSD base system has received binary updates for security and some other important problems in the base OS through syspatch(8) for the last few releases.

We are pleased to announce that we now also provide selected binary packages for the most recent release. These are built from the -stable ports tree which receives security and a few other important fixes:

-release: fixed point in time, no update (6.3, 6.4, 6.5, ...).
-stable: conservative updates only. For ports, only the most recent release is updated (currently 6.5).
-current: main development branch, receives bigger changes.

Initial updates for amd64 are already available at most mirrors (check for the /pub/OpenBSD/6.5/packages-stable directory). i386 is currently building and will follow soon. If the mirror you are using is not synced yet, you will need to wait or use a different one.

pkg_add(1) already had the required heuristic to manage -stable packages. It will be able to use the /packages-stable/ directory in the following two cases:

1. you use /etc/installurl and the PKG_PATH environment variable is not set (default installation case)
2. you use the PKG_PATH environment variable and it uses %c or %m

The two directories are separate because the "packages" directory holds the packages built at the release time. They will not be updated.

The packages-stable directory will be empty at the time of a new release. Its contents will grow during the release life cycle as security fixes and other fixes are committed to the -stable ports tree.

If pkg_add(1) installs a new package and you meet the conditions for using the packages-stable directory, detailed above, the version in packages-stable will be chosen instead of the original supplied at release time. This also applies when using `pkg_add -u` to upgrade packages.

This means that, in a default installation, pkg_add will automatically pick the latest version available to you.

In the case of updating an installed package, this may require restarting the running binaries to use the new code.

More info on the package system can be found at the following link: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html

Surprisingly, nobody saw the new directory show up on our mirrors, and then report it on our mailing lists.