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From: marc_merlin@magic.metawire.com (Marc MERLIN)
Subject: rhupgrade 2.0, upgrade your RedHat system by hand
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 13:48:49 GMT
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Rhupgrade is a perl program that assists you in doing a hand upgrade of your
RedHat system.
What's new?
Version 2.0 (03/04/98)
- - More or less completely re-rewrote and cleaned-up, with a more correct
handling of all possible cases.
- - Added more output files, to give out more information (this includes a
list of currently installed packages, sorted by distribution).
- - Added the -ud and -ubh options to better detect improperly packaged RH
packages
- - Updated the documentation, including instructions on how to upgrade to RH
5.0
Here's the LSM entry:
Begin3
Title: rhupgrade
Version: 2.0
Entered-date: 04MAR98
Description: The purpose of this Perl script is to help you in doing a
hand upgrade from one version of a Redhat distribution (4.x
or above) to a newer one.
It requires the list of packages available in the
distribution you are planing to upgrade to, and it will use,
if you have it, the list of packages that were available for
the current distribution you are running.
From there, it will tell you which packages have new version
and release numbers, which packages are exactly the same,
and which packages are new (if you provided the list of old
packages). It will take into account the "contrib" RPMs
installed on your system, and warn you of any possible clash
with packages in the release you plan to upgrade to, and it
will also show all the packages installed on your system,
sorted by distribution. Last, but not least, it will show
you which packages appeared in the new distribution, and
which ones disappeared.
Some of the reasons for using this program include: wanting
to upgrade only some packages, possibly without rebooting
your system, having a list of what you can upgrade, and
hand-picking the new packages you want to retrieve via ftp
and upgrade, or just having an idea of what was upgraded in
the new release.
This program can (and has been) used to upgrade to Hurricane
(RedHat 5.0). It contains specific help to make the
procedure a little easier.
Keywords: RedHat, Upgrade, RPM
Author: marcsoft@magic.metawire.com (Marc Merlin)
Home-Page: http://magic.metawire.com/~merlin/linux/
Primary-site: ftp://magic.metawire.com/pub/linux/
47.7kB rhupgrade-2.0-3.i386.rpm
55.1kB rhupgrade-2.0-3.src.rpm
52.7kB rhupgrade-2.0.tar.gz
Alternate-site: ftp.redhat.com /pub/contrib/i386/
47.7kB rhupgrade-2.0-3.i386.rpm
Alternate-site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/utils/package
52.7kB rhupgrade-2.0.tar.gz
Copying-policy: GPL
End
And here are a few reasons why you would want to use this program:
o The floppy upgrade may just not work for you (for me,
the Hurricane upgrade on floppy died with a
segmentation fault while it was parsing the packages
that were installed on my system. I do not know
whether the 4.1 and 4.2 upgrades would have worked
because the last time I did one without this program
was 3.03 to 4.0).
o Upgrading the RH way involves rebooting from floppy
disks that are going to mount your partitions and do
the magic upgrades there. Even though RPM does a
pretty good job at not doing anything stupid, on
heavily customised systems you can have potential
problems and/or surprises (on my machine /var/lib/rpm
is a link to /usr/lib/rhs/rpm/ because this prevents
me from running RPM before remounting /usr in r/w
mode. Obviously the upgrade procedure will fail if you
have an absolute link (you would have to changed the
absolute link to a relative link a la link_relative in
NFS).
o More generally, even if the upgrade is able to work on
your system, you may have fiddled with your system a
little too much to not quite trust the upgrade
procedure to do the right thing anymore :-D
o Apart from the problems mentionned above, if you are
doing an upgrade to a minor upgrade of the RH
distribution (for example 4.0 to 4.1 or 4.2 (or later,
5.0 to some other 5.x). 4.x to 5.x is not exactly a
minor upgrade), you may think that the floppy disk
reboot and upgrade procedure is overkill
o You may be using the e2compr patches
http://www.netspace.net.au/~reiter/e2compr/ which
renders your compressed ext2 partitions unreadable by
standard RH boot/upgrade floppies
o You may also be annoyed by the fact that you need to
reboot your running system just to upgrade a few
packages. (Or you may not want to ruin your chances of
winning the uptime war you have with your
roomate/neighbor :-D)
o You may want to have your full system running, and
have all your files easily available during the
upgrade process so that you can look around, fix a few
things on a fly, and upgrade packages at your own
pace, using the opportunity to find out what RH
changed, how, and why.
o You want to upgrade by hand, you know how to use RPM
from the command line, and you're not afraid a fixing
a few things by hand, need be, but you find it painful
to make the list of the new available packages,
compare it to what you have currently, and figure out
what you want to upgrade.
o You may have a flaky/slow Internet connection, and
doing an full ftp upgrade may be too long/too
expensive/too difficult (wrt keeping the connection
alive). So, you decide to first ftp the packages you
want to upgrade, but you need to create such a list
(as obviously, you don't want to get package-x.y-z if
you already have package-x.y-z installed on your disk
(because the only difference between the two is the
name of the release in the 'Distribution:' field
announced by rpm -qip package.rpm)).
o You may just want to know which packages have changed
(version number updates, or RH release updates), which
packages are new, and decide what to ftp and upgrade
when you get around to finding the time to take care
of it.
Enjoy,
Marc
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