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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.mathworks.com!news1.best.com!news.idiom.com!nntp2.ba.best.com!not-for-mail From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Upgrading 2.1.x to 2.2.2-RELEASE Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 01:53:25 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 44 Message-ID: <3386AC85.167EB0E7@FreeBSD.org> References: <chad-2305972230300001@sverige.pengar.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-STABLE i386) To: Chad Leigh <chad@pengar.com> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:41537 Chad Leigh wrote: > What is the best way to go about upgradng running 2.1.x (where x is a high > number :-) systems to 2.2.2-RELEASE . The best way? Back up all the files you'd like to save, including your old /etc directory, and then reinstall the system from scratch. That's better than using sysinstall's upgrade option because upgrade doesn't *remove* files, it simply lays the new ones down on top, and that sometimes (rarely, but still often enough to count) causes problems when things false-detect old bits as an indication that they're still running under the previous version of the OS, and that can definitely cause problems. If you upgrade your src directory this way, for example, it will not build afterwards because things that we moved in the source tree will now exist in two places, and some Makefiles become very confused at this. /usr/src is definitely something you're recommended to either upgrade with CVS (which will preserve your local changes, if you have any) or by simply blowing away and resurrecting each time from the latest distribution, and don't forget to either save your /sys/i386/conf/<KERNEL> file in that case or at least get in the habit of using ``options INCLUDE_CONFIG_FILE'' :-). So, in summary, if you upgrade by blowing the old system completely away (perhaps stopping short of an actual disk formatting pass :) each time, you will be a happier person in the long run and experience far fewer "weird problems." Restore has an interactive option which makes bringing back the old stuff fairly painless as well - you just cd around in an imaginary filesystem and tag the files you want, finally saying "ok, do it!" when you're satisfied with your extraction list. Good stuff, and anything which forces you to do a comprehensive backup can't be an entirely bad thing either, eh? :-) Ultimately, of course, the upgrade procedure needs to change completely so that patching, replacement, removal and rename operations are all supported primitives in the distribution/packaging mechanism (well, "distributions" and packages would first merge of course). Then you could ensure that an upgrade got you to exactly the same place that a backup, new install and careful restore would get you. It's on my TODO list. ;-) -- - Jordan Hubbard FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM.