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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!lucy.swin.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!news.idt.net!mr.net!newshub.tc.umn.edu!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Why upgrades are not simpler? Date: 8 Jan 1997 02:17:30 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 40 Message-ID: <5av03q$aus@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <5akno1$ras$1@news-s01.ca.us.ibm.net> <5amvjp$q75@uriah.heep.sax.de> <5as228$37j@uuneo.neosoft.com> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:33797 conrads@neosoft.com (Conrad Sabatier) wrote: > > Consider this an official ``job offer'' if you like. :) > > Are there any archives of any discussions/ideas concerning this subject? Not that i know of, but i remember that Jordan emitted some ideas recently, after the utmp.h changes in FreeBSD-current. > On the surface, it seems like it should be a fairly straightforward > procedure, but I suspect there are some hidden pitfalls that I'm not > considering. > > Why not simply upgrade binaries and sources *only*, leaving /etc, /var, > /home, /dev untouched? First, you need to offer something for upgrading these, too. Look, if /etc/services has been extended since the last release, or if /etc/sysconfig has been modified, and the modifications are not in an area where the local admin has even changed a bit, he will certainly want to accept the new changes as well. Hence you gotta offer them to him. For a more complicated matter, see the recent utmp.h changes. They render all existing /var/log/wtmp* files useless if they remain unmodified. However, you can't leave the people at their own mercy with this, you need to show them a way of moving the files to the new format. Finally, somebody found that, after upgrading to FreeBSD 3.1.4, his mumblefratz driver no longer works. So now, he wants to revert everything back to FreeBSD 2.7.1, where he came from. Hence, the upgrade process should at least support one level of `undo' operation. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)