restoring user accounts after an upgrade/reinstall?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  historically, when i move up from one version of RH to the next, or
one version of FC to the next, i like to preserve the non-OS
filesystems (in particular, /home), save the current config files from
/etc off somewhere safe, install over top of the system partitions,
then restore everything related to the user accounts to get all those
accounts back.

  that would involve remounting the non-formatted /home partition, and
restoring all of the user account info to places like /etc/passwd,
/etc/shadow, /etc/group, etc.  so far, it's worked well.  i just let
the install put brand new /etc files down, then *carefully* cut and
paste the old user info back into those files.

  is there any reason to think that won't work this time?  i've got a
server doing an install as we speak, and i'm always nervous that,
maybe, a new FC release has some additional user info it needs that
didn't exist in an earlier release.

  any thoughts on whether this technique should still work?  i'll find
out in an hour or two, i suspect, it would just be nice to have some
advance warning if there are some surprises in store.

rday

p.s.  i'm configuring selinux for "warning" on the new system.  if i
enabled it, would that be an issue here for some reason?