[UCLA-LUG] Upgrading questions . . .

[Josh Barratt]

Hey all . . . I have what once was a version of Mandrake 6.1 (6.2?)
installed on my machine . . . however, I've upgraded umpteen rpm's etc since
then and it is currently far from a stock anything. Anyway, I'd like to
upgrade this beast to a stock mandrake 7.1 or whatever the latest is . . .
I'm starting to have odd inconsistencies in a lot of the gnome garbage, etc.
and it'd be nice to sort of start again with a lot of that stuff. (And I
tried installing Helix, but I have an "unsupported distro" so it barfs.) My
question is about how "clobbery" the upgrade process is . . . I have a lot
of customization here, lots of non-rpm software installed, custom init.d
scripts, sendmail stuff, etc etc etc. I'll back up the whole /etc tree but I
don't have hours and hours right now to get everything back the way it was
if I have to manually fix tons of stuff. Does anyone have any experience in
what the upgrade process actually does and how nasty it could get?

Thanks a bunch . . .
    Josh