Author: Vic Date: To: hampshire Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Dependency hell (Was: Re: Xorg is hungry today...)
> The Red Hat v5.3 release notes state, "In-place upgrades across major
> releases do not preserve all system settings, services or custom
> configurations. Consequently, Red Hat strongly recommends fresh
> installations when upgrading from one major version to another."
It would be a mistake to confuse CYA with actual requirements... :-)
> That doesn't strike me as the most practical way of handling release
> upgrades - are settings somehow preserved if one carries out a fresh
> install? Of course not, so the only way in which that appears to be better
> is that you know that all settings have been lost. Yes, I know that one
> can carry out rolling upgrades with Red Hat, but they are not supported.
> Debian puts a huge effort into ensuring rolling upgrades work, and I have
> to say that they are very successful (and supported).
The same is true of RH-based distributions; I've done it hundreds of times
without incident. The only time it really gets interesting is when a
package requires a new config file (config is specifically marked within
the package management system) - in that case, the old config gets saved
with a ".rpmsave" extension, and the new config put in place. This is
quite a rare occurence; new config usually gets generated with a .rpmnew
extension, and the existing config stays in place.
The only time I can remember being bitten by config wierdness across
updates was - you guessed it, the Kubuntu upgrade I did at the weekend.
