VDQ : upgrade 3.0 -- which way?

[Beartooth]

On Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 10:44:02 -0600 (MDT), "nathan r. hruby" 
<nathan@drama.uga.edu> lucubrated and expounded:
> 
> A glob in yum is a flieglob, the same semantics that your shell uses
> to figure out filenames: "foo*" means "everything starting with foo"

	Is that supposed to read fileglob? Not that I make head or tail 
of it either way -- you're far over my head.
 
> > > In short - 
> > > yum update
> 
> No.  update will update things with a different take on dependancies,
> if you're doing an *upgrade* use 'yum upgrade'

	You tell me. I've had the CDs for something like a month, during 
which there've bugfixes, security fixes, and God knows what all other 
stuff. The iBook is basically my wife's, though I also use it when away 
from home. I want her to be able to just sit down and use it, as she & I 
both did at the Library of Congress, where we had layer above layer 
above layer of skilled and specialized people backing us up. I at least 
find linux fun -- when I'm not overwhelmed. She won't.
 
> Err.. yum will fetch all of the headers in each yum repository that
> /etc/yum.conf points at.  This will make it looks like it's
> downloading lots ...

	You can say that again! It was still getting them when I started
this! And that's on a DSL connection. It has stopped now, but without
giving my prompt back; so I presume it's hung, not finished ...
 
> but in reality, it's only grabbing the headers which are teeny.

> After that, it will tell you what packages you need to upgrade, and
> what additional packages you need to install to satisfy dependancies.  

	If/when it gets so far? How long should I let it alone in hope 
of that? Ten more minutes? A hundred? It's been going something like 
half an hour or an hour, and there are tewnty-odd screns of fine print 
there now.

> A "yum upgrade" will also look at the Obsoletes headers in each RPM
> and make sure things that need to get removed because newer RPM's
> replace them in fact are.

	I.e., the upgrade is preferable to the update??
 
> This will be a *very* large delta becasue you're updating updating
> every single package on the system.  25 GB I think would be enough.  

	Good goddlemityDAM! If it fills *that* up, I'm zonked: 25GB is
the size of the whole YDL installation!

> If you're worried do a 'yum list installed' and then use 'yum remove'
> to thin down that list be removing things you don't need.

	Just type what's in your quotes, and hit enter? It seems 
remarkably bassackward -- more sense, if I understand you (and I doubt 
that) would be only to take what I need in the first place. 

	Surely 'yum remove' needs a list of targets? If I knew how to
tell which to specify -- i.e., which I either use, or need available to
be called by things I use -- I wouldn't be asking this. I'm *years* of 
work away from being able to read down the list saying "keep this, toss 
that, keep this ..."

> Also note that yum will download the packages to /var/cache/yum by
> default, so make sure you have anough space on var to handle all of
> the packages, plud RPM's database and anything else that gets added to
> /var.  

	That would make sense if I had any idea how to do it -- I think
...

> If you don't think you have enough space on /var for this, you can
> move /var/yum/cache to a bigger partition and then symlink
> /var/yum/cache to the new loaction.  /etc/yum.conf also allows you to
> chnage the localtion as well.

	Well, I know it's possible to move things from one partition to
another. And I think I have a faint glimmering what a symlink is. But I
have no idea how to *do* either, and wouldn't recognize it if it got
baked into a pie and thrown in my face. For about a year and a quarter
now, I've been spending more time on linux than even an old retired fart
can afford -- and we still have to settle the contract on the new house, 
move into it, unpack, arrange our worldly goods, ....
 
> Once the update is done, you can do a 'yum clean' do remove all of the
> used/unneeded stuff.

	Do I do that -- as I certainly hope -- before I tell it to 
install anything? 

-- 
Beartooth Implacable <karhunhammas (at) lserv.com> 
FREE at last: Retired to the Mountains, No Mortgage
Keep in mind that I know little of what I'm talking about!