Why Build Your Own OpenBSD?

Building your own upgrade from OpenBSD’s source is intended only for advanced users and those interested in developing OpenBSD and advanced users. You must be comfortable reading and compiling source code, debugging problems, and restoring from backup before even trying to build OpenBSD from source. In OpenBSD’s earlier days, I found upgrading from source to be the easiest way to move forward, but now upgrading via snapshot is much easier and much less error-prone. If there’s any way you can use an official binary release to install what you’re looking for, do so.

When you build OpenBSD from source, you are building the distribution sets that you installed via FTP or CD. The files might not be bundled up in distributions, but their contents will be the same. You still must merge your configuration files with sysmerge, and you will still need to update your installed software. The only thing building OpenBSD gets you is the latest version of the branch you’re following.

I know of three reasons to build your own OpenBSD from source: to get OpenBSD-stable, to get the latest OpenBSD-current, or to highly customize OpenBSD. OpenBSD-stable is available only as source code. No official installation media is available for -stable, so if you want to go from 5.4-release to 5.4-stable, you must build it from source. If you want the absolutely latest OpenBSD code—newer than the latest snapshot—you must build it. And if you want to highly customize OpenBSD, you must build it from source.