*BSD News Article 32819


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From: knight@caboom.zko.dec.com (Dave Knight)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Upgrading just binaries to 1.1.5.1?
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 1994 07:40:39
Organization: FUSE
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <knight.6.0007ADB0@caboom.zko.dec.com>
References: <LEWIKK.94Jul9205222@grasshopper.aud.alcatel.com> <knight.4.00099DA4@caboom.zko.dec.com> <302m8l$9tp@quagga.ru.ac.za>
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In article <302m8l$9tp@quagga.ru.ac.za> csgr@cs.ru.ac.za (Geoff Rehmet) writes:

>If you start by doing an install from the kcopy and filesys floppies,
>you will land up newfs'ing your disk again - which will tend to destroy
>your existing setup.

That's exactly what I expected would happen . . .

>I would recommend reinstalling and then reloading /home /usr/local etc
>from tape, and then replacing some of the files in /etc by hand.

hmmm. . . Considering how much work I put in to getting 1.1 the way I wanted 
it, I was hoping that there was some relatively safe way of upgrading "in 
place" without having to build the whole world from scratch again. Oh well, 
thanks anyway.

>I would not recommend extracting the bindist over your exsiting system, 
>unless you know exactly what you are doing -- it's very easy to cause 
>yourself some nastiness, especially by nuking your shared libraries ;-)

I can easily believe that.

I still find it a bit hard to believe that the best way to upgrade is to do a 
full reinstall followed by a reinstall of the various packages and files that
were set up andtailored for a previous version. That sort of implies that it 
would be easier and safer to do a full source build based on the new source 
tree, rather than attempting to do some sort of a binary update.  True?

>(One upgrade based on a full install, and then reloading local files
>from tape took me a little over 2 hours.)

Any future plans to make upgrades a bit less effort than full installs?

Thanks for the help.
-------------------
Dave Knight                        knight@ka1dt.mv.com (home)
                                            knight@caboom.zko.dec.com (work)