Re: About freebsd-automerge — An automated upgrade assistant for FreeBSD

1. There are multiple references to nano when it's not in base. You may want to save the user's EDITOR before overriding it or fall back to either vi or ee instead.

2. The architecture detection code is wrong. The FreeBSD download URL is organized as "$machine/$arch" but the code does "$arch/$arch". What you want is "$(uname -m)/$(uname -p)". The code as it is doesn't even make sense: do a case switch on a value only to set the variable to the same value!

3. The "\n" escape sequences in the argument to die on line 504 don't actually insert line breaks.

> **1. Is using `$EDITOR` the right hook into freebsd-update?**
> Is there a cleaner, more supported way to intercept freebsd-update's merge
> phase? I am essentially abusing the EDITOR variable — it works, but it feels
> fragile. Is there an official API or hook mechanism I am missing?

To my understanding, freebsd-update is being phased out so you probably shouldn't be writing new scripts depending on it.

> **3. Handling STABLE and CURRENT upgrades**
> Upgrading to a -STABLE or -CURRENT branch is fundamentally different from
> a RELEASE upgrade — freebsd-update behaves differently, and the base.txz
> download path is different. Has anyone automated this reliably?

The snapshot assets (-STABLE & -CURRENT) are not reliable. I've noticed -CURRENT stuff disappear for days even.