Re: 7.2: Install or Upgrade?

[ABrady <kcsmart kc rr com>]

On Sat, 13 Oct 2001 13:27:47 -0600 (MDT) Blake Thornton
<thornton math utah edu> imparted to us:
> With all this 7.2 talk, I was wondering what the pros and cons were to
> installing a new version versus upgrading?
> 
> In the past, I have always choosen the install option and reconfigured
> everything (which isn't much for me since I'm running a single user
> computer).

Upgrade keeps your config files in place (mostly) and keeps you from
having to start all over. It also can resolve conflicts make sure
everything getting installed is going to work together. The downside is,
if you don't choose expert mode, it installs new for only what you have,
not whatever is new on the distro and wasn't available before. It can
sometimes overwrite config files (not often) or cause third-party things
to stop working and require reinstall/reconfig.

Install can be made to put everything on the system. It assures that
everything installed will play nice with everything else. The downside
is you have to reconfigure everything. Any oddball mountpoints or
symlinks you may have made (I personally like /dev/cdrom to mount at
/cdrom instead of /mnt/cdrom, similar for /floppy) will be obliterated.

A compromise is to save config files away someplace safe, do an install,
restore the configs and tweak whatever needs it. Leave some partitions
alone (primarily /home is fine to leave alone) so that some settings can
be preserved. The downside is, some configs might change (samba has been
known to stop working, as has sendmail and others). Restoring them
manually can cause mistakes to be made and default configs to get
trashed that fit new needs where the old won't work anymore.

In either case, some things that you installed manually may be broken by
new versions of libraries or changes in config files/formats that get
missed. Third-party stuff may not work, and may never work again, with
whatever changes get made to libs and such.

-- 
I've given up trying to change the world. I'm going to toilet train
it so that I never have to change it again.