F8 -> F9 but keeping KDE3: technically feasible?

[Roberto Ragusa]

Andrew Farris wrote:
> Roberto Ragusa wrote:
>>
>> do you think it can be possible to upgrade a F8 to F9 with
>> exclusion of the KDE packages?
>>
>> My idea would be to keep qt, qt4 and kde* packages from F8,
>> and upgrade all the rest.
 >
> I believe you would have to go about this by running several (maybe 
> many) yum upgrades separately.  There is no good way to get that upgrade 
> done with anaconda.  You would need to construct some careful excludes 
> for those yum upgrades so it would force those packages, and anything 
> that depend on them, to get skipped.  It probably will not be pretty.. 
> it probably will take you forever to work through the upgrade.. and it 
> will probably cause lots of packages to fail for deps.  You're going to 
> end up with a hybrid of F8/F9 that might be mostly F8 (at least as far 
> as the kde apps or anything qt based are concerned you won't upgrade 
> anything).  You might run into issues due to glibc and the gcc  change 
> that will stop you cold, I don't know.  Best way to find out is try 
> running some yum commands without confirming the changes and see what a 
> messy list of dependency problems you get.

So, anaconda is out of question. This is not too bad, as yum is a
(semi?)official upgrade method and I can have greater control with
yum.

Running yum a lot with excludes etc. doesn't worry me much, as it
usually happens when upgrading because I use many external (and
sometimes fighting) repositories.

Can I reasonably expect binary compatibility for F8 packages
on F9? I hope gcc ABI didn't change drastically.

I think I will try my luck next days; in the worst scenario I will
restore a full backup.
But I'm sadly using the nvidia binary driver on this machine
(Quadro FX 570M) and it looks like neither the binary nor the open
source drivers are an easy path for F9. If I don't find a
good solution for this, attempting the F9+KDE3 mess becomes
less attractive.

Thank you for your considerations, Andrew.

-- 
    Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it