recent upgrade caused me problems

[Eric]

At 02:24 AM 5/20/2007, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

<DHR>>>>>Since the list is not full of complaints, my problem is probably 
unique.  But I want to share it anyway.<<<<<

Good morning, Hugh.

I can tell you that your problem is nowhere near unique.

I learned a long time ago not to blindly "upgrade everything" since it was 
sure to cause no end of problems eventually.

I have a fresh installation of FC6, and decided what the hell, may as well 
try a global upgrade and see what happens (after somebody in 
comp.os.linux.setup said something like "You're going to run yum -yt 
upgrade anyway, right?").

First of all, what is the "-t" switch to yum?  I know "-y" tells yum to 
answer "yes" to everything, but I can't find "-t" in the man page.  But, I 
digress...

Anyway, I tried a global yum upgrade of everything in my fresh FC6 
installation, and after several hours, it hung pretty much the same as 
yours did.  I rebooted, and cannot get the new kernel (2.6.20) to boot... 
gives me kernel errors.

So, I rebooted back to 2.6.18.

Now, I have absolutely NO idea what shape my installation is in, suspect 
it's not good at several levels, and I don't know what to do about it other 
than do a fresh re-install (which as I said this was a fresh install anyway 
so in THIS case that's not a big problem).

My problem for the future, though, is I have absolutely NO idea how to 
revert to a previous installation and remove the effects of a failed "yum 
-yt upgrade".

Can any of you direct me to some reading material that explains how to do that?

Otherwise, I don't dare upgrade or update much of anything, which for many 
reasons is not good policy...