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From: csgr@cs.ru.ac.za (Geoff Rehmet)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Upgrading just binaries to 1.1.5.1?
Date: 16 Jul 1994 09:16:46 GMT
Organization: Rhodes University Computing Services
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Message-ID: <3088hv$ake@quagga.ru.ac.za>
References: <LEWIKK.94Jul9205222@grasshopper.aud.alcatel.com> <knight.4.00099DA4@caboom.zko.dec.com> <302m8l$9tp@quagga.ru.ac.za> <knight.6.0007ADB0@caboom.zko.dec.com>
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In <knight.6.0007ADB0@caboom.zko.dec.com> knight@caboom.zko.dec.com (Dave Knight) writes:
>In article <302m8l$9tp@quagga.ru.ac.za> csgr@cs.ru.ac.za (Geoff Rehmet) writes:
>hmmm. . . Considering how much work I put in to getting 1.1 the way I wanted
>it, I was hoping that there was some relatively safe way of upgrading "in
>place" without having to build the whole world from scratch again. Oh well,
>thanks anyway.
Unfortunately it is trickier to put a new bindist into place without
upsetting your existing configuration.
Writing some sort of upgrade script would be equally tricky.
Unfortunately the best way is to back up and reinstall - like the big
boys will tell you to do.
>>I would not recommend extracting the bindist over your exsiting system,
>>unless you know exactly what you are doing -- it's very easy to cause
>>yourself some nastiness, especially by nuking your shared libraries ;-)
>I still find it a bit hard to believe that the best way to upgrade is to do a
>full reinstall followed by a reinstall of the various packages and files that
>were set up andtailored for a previous version. That sort of implies that it
>would be easier and safer to do a full source build based on the new source
>tree, rather than attempting to do some sort of a binary update. True?
This of course assumes you have the resources to compile the source.
If your original system is installed properly (ie. users in a place
such as /home, local stuff in /usr/local), what you need to do is
1) back up (to tape or over the network to another disk)
2) install the new version
3) restore /usr/local
/usr/gnu
/home
/var
/usr/X386
4) restore selected files in /etc and edit a few others.
5) get back online.
(The above took me a little more than 2 hours, excluding the time
during which backups were running.)
This will get you back all of the local packages which you installed
and twiddled. Of course, if you changed things /usr/bin or other
places like that, you get what you ask for - a mess.
>Any future plans to make upgrades a bit less effort than full installs?
This is a very difficult thing to do, as everyone has their idea of how
they would like to configure their system in special local ways. How
can an upgrade script predict that I have modified /etc/gettytab? How
do you merge updates to /etc/ttys with local changes? The list is
endless.
As Nate pointed out, writing an upgrade script is a very thankless
task. Such an effort is also prone to draw more criticism than praise.
I'm sorry this makes your life difficult. I would however rather see
people spend a bit more time and get things done properly, rather than
get their systems fried by an upgrade script which can't quite handle
their local configuration. (Remember that, if you have your wits about
you and do things carefully, an upgrade from the new bindist is
possible. I would however suspect that this would take more than 2
hours ;-)
Geoff.
--
Geoff Rehmet, Computer Science Department, | ____ _ o /\
Rhodes University, South Africa |___ _-\_<, / /\/\
FreeBSD core team | (*)/'(*) /\/ / \ \
csgr@cs.ru.ac.za, csgr@freefall.cdrom.com, geoff@neptune.ru.ac.za