Upgrade 2.3 to 3.0?

[nathan r. hruby]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Rick Thomas wrote:

> Nathan seems to be assuming that you are talking about upgrading a 
> 2.x box to 3.0.  

Well, that's what the subject says ;-)

> If so, you are probably out of luck.  There are so 
> *many* changes between 2.x and 3.0 that finding a safe sequence to 
> install the new things and de-install the old ones (in which step 
> "n" doesn't break things so badly that step "n+1" can't proceed) is 
> probably impossible.  

Nothing's 'impossible' but many things are not worth the trouble.  
Upgrades are on that hazy line somewhere between.  For instance, I would
not desire to upgrade a 2.3 desktop box to 3.0. OTOH, doing a straight
upgrade of my vanilla minimal server would be desireable and shouldn't be 
that difficult.

> 
> Yum takes dependancies (pre- and post-) into account properly.  It 
> calculates a safe sequence to do things in.  And does it.  All with 
> very minimal human intervention.  For details, read the man pages 
> (At the command prompt, type "man yum".  Be sure to check the "SEE 
> ALSO" section, and follow the links you find there.)
> 
> I think yum is *almost* smart enough to do the 2.x to 3.0 upgrade, 
> but I wouldn't want to be the first to try it on a live system!
> 

Err.. That's why I want a test box first :)  Yum does rock.  If you check 
the archives, people have been doing 7.x to 8.0 and 8.0 to 9.0 upgrades 
using yum.  I did a 7.0 to 7.3 upgrade the other day pretty flawlessly 
(disk space issues aside :).  As for keeping a box current, it's almost 
fire and forget.

-n
-- 
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nathan hruby <nathan@drama.uga.edu>
computer services specialist  
uga drama & theatre                        
reality is a moving target
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