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Upgrading?

Upgrading?

Posted Jun 28, 2004 16:05 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
Parent article: A look at Slackware 10.0

I started with Slackware back in 1995, switched to Red Hat 3.03 because
of RPM's dependency support, and (after a diversion with Mandrake)
switched to Debian to avoid dependency hell and to get easy upgrades.

Yet much of the Slackware philosophy appeals to me, at least for certain
types of machine. So I'd be interested in an account of how easy it is
to install new packages (which depend on other packages) after
installing, and how easy it is to upgrade from one Slackware installation
to another.


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Upgrading?

Posted Jun 28, 2004 16:59 UTC (Mon) by otavio (subscriber, #337) [Link]

If you look in release announce you will see some new tools in contrib directory to help on this.

Now, upgrade a slack installation *should* be easy. Try it and see yourself ;-)

Upgrading?

Posted Jun 28, 2004 20:26 UTC (Mon) by DaveK (subscriber, #2531) [Link]

Upgrading Slackware distributions is easy.
ihave migrated several systems over time from 8.1->9.0->9.1 and then via current to 10.0.
I use the swaret tool which appeared in the /extras directory, but now seems to have gone away again, which includes a system of dependencies.
Alternatively, one can download the various packages and invoke upgradepkg from the standard slackware package tools.
Most new slackware packages are also careful not to clobber configuration files and instead deposit a .new file slongside. the install script then discards the .new files if the md5sums match, leaving the administrator to reconcile any differences.

Regarding "Dependency Hell"

Posted Jun 28, 2004 20:51 UTC (Mon) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

Just to clarify, dependency hell doesn't really exist anymore. It was
first cured when Red Hat introduced Red Hat Network and the up2date
application which was a trial / subscription service. Then people created
apt for rpm and yum.

These days, with Fedora Core, yum and up2date are basically
interchangable. Setting up a yum repository takes about a minute if you
already have a web accessible directory with the desired packages in it.

Of course RHEL customers are using the up2date system with RHN.

Much of dependency hell was caused by bad packagers but not all.

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