[UCLA-LUG] Upgrading questions . . .

[tchow]

Sorry guys, but when i last upgraded mandrake and helix gnome things didn't
go as smoothly as i'd like.  however, this was a while ago.  so maybe
everything has gotten better since then.  i'll list some problems i ran
into:

* I had to jump through way too many hoops to get the helix gnome installer
working.  dependencies here, non-supported distributions there. in fact, i
was using mandrake 6.2 and it didn't work.

* i tried for a good long time manually downloading the RPMs for helix gnome
and install them.  throw in some weird dependcy problems i didn't understand
and super slow downloads from the helixgnome website and you have one
unhappy camper

* the installer isn't that smart.  somehow its smart enough to see i have
certain dependency problems, but its not smart enough to automatically get
new RPMs to fix those dependency problems, yet it can automatically get some
helix gnome rpms

* after jumping through so many hoops to get helix gnome installed, i
couldn't for the life of me remember what i did so i couldn't backtrack my
steps.

* one of the hoops was to upgrade to mandrake 7.0.  by the time i was done
trying to deal with helix gnome, i had very nearly a mandrake 7.0
distribution, except maybe something insignificant (to me) like initscripts
or something similar.  but the helix gnome installer still refused to work. 
why was i trying so hard to avoid the "real" upgrade to mandrake 7.0?

* because my experiences with upgrades of mandrake and to a lesser extent
redhat were far from perfect.  mandrake loves to shove in new stuff onto
your system.  my /usr partition (yes, its a seperate partition) always grows
by a substantial amount.  much more than i'd expect if i were to manually
upgrade every package i have installed to the newest version.

* i distinctly remember not having any kde stuff installed before i
upgraded.  mysteriously, i got a boatload of kde stuff installed after
upgrading.  did i specify this?  no.

+ sidenote:  i don't have any problems with kde.  i simply don't use it.

* upgrade to mandrake 7.0 broke my X configuration.  yeah, it left me
scratching my head.  whatever it did, it didn't write a proper XF86Config
and i had to reconfigure.

* either helix gnome or mandrake 7 screwed up my gtk theme.  

* i got a stupid new splash screen before my gnome and sawmill started up.

* being somewhat security conscious, i checked the maximum security level. 
it changed some stuff that annoyed me a whole lot and seemed unnecessarily
paranoid to me.  e.g. change permissions on my printer so users couldn't
print.

* it changed many system wide defaults and configurations.  sure, it did
backup my old confiuguration but in the end i still had to do extra work to
get my system back to the way i want it.  e.g. it changed my root .bashrc

* all my super picky ls colors got screwed up for all users.  and fixing it
wasn't as simple as changing my .bashrc or .bash_profile.  mandrake decided
to run colorls in some strange place...

nevertheless, think twice doing an upgrade like this and listening to mark
:)  i thought it was absurd that i had to take some of my old configuration
files (saved as *.rpmsave) and throw them back in.  mark brings up a good
point about your non-RPM stuff.  be careful.  an ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of care!

So the real question is how did i fix all these annoyances with a mandrake
and helix gnome upgrade?  i never did.  i lived a couple days with the
annoyances (it was tough), getting extremely frustrated making my stuff the
way it was before and then installed debian (the land of painless upgrades). 
debian has plenty of painful goodies though...

tchow

and yes, i whine too much. 



On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 07:41:17PM -0700, Mark James Fasheh wrote:
> Josh,
> 	I've never really upgraded (or used) Mandrake, but I did a very
> similar thing from rh6.0 to rh6.1.  Basically, the install went fine, and
> the installer simply didn't install any RPMS that were older than what I
> had.  RPM also saved any configuration files that were to be overwritten to
> FILENAME.rpmsave.  As far as non-rpm software goes, most of mine worked
> fine, though there were some inconsistencies.  Things definately needed to
> be fixed though, so I would plan to have to do some of that.
> 	--Mark
> 
> On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 02:50:36PM -0700, Josh Barratt wrote:
> > 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