Upgrades was Re: Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 vs Redhat

[der.hans]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, J.L.Francois wrote:

> It seems like on Wed, Apr 12, 2000 at 12:01:30PM -0700, Victor Odhner scribbled:
> Orig Msg> So, what you're saying here is that there's no non-destructive way
> Orig Msg> to upgrade a new distribution?
> 
> <PERSONAL EXPERIENCE>
> Only Debian & Debian  based distros,
> can do upgrades in place without wreaking 
> havoc on your configuration files.
> </PERSONAL EXPERIENCE>
> 
> I would be interested in hearing  other 
> peoples experiences with system upgrades
> that didn't involve reboots or 
> reconstructing config files from backups
> by hand.

While I've seen the light and am moving most everything over to debian, in
a former lifetime I was known to use such odd things as slackware and
SuSE. Updating slackware seldom caused problems because you just go out
grab the latest tarball, unpack it, configure it, build it, fix the bugs,
build it... :). Actually slack updates went pretty smoothly, but I didn't
do them very often.

SuSE's updates go ok, but they move all of the old config files out of the
way, which sucks cuz then you've got to run "updatedb && locate conf.old |
less", then figure out which ones were moved by the update and put them
back in place. It usually wasn't too much, though. Dist-upgrades always
required reboots if I remember properly, hence my firewall never got
updated. Probably a bad thing :). They've had a mechanism to update via
ftp (don't know why they never added http), but I never got it to work
properly.

In truth I find that RedHat updates go the most smoothly because I install
something else ;-).

ciao,

der.hans
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