[wplug] Red Hat 8.0 "features"

[Mark R. Dzmura]

I concur with James on this.

Since RedHat 4.x I have followed this policy religously
for "important" desktop systems and found it to work well.

1. For minor releases (5.1 to 5.2, 7.0 to 7.1, etc..), do updates.

2. For major releases (5.1 to 6.0, 6.2 to 7.1, etc..), do new installs.

To make new installs easier, I keep enough drives on important systems (2 is
enough) so that I always have available partitions to have at least
two fully installed OS distributions - old and new.  These partition
"sets" get swapped every major version upgrade, and you can pretty
much keep your /home, /opt, /usr2, /usr/local and similar partitions,
(which the distro doesn't use much) "as is".  (Let the new content for
these partitions get installed under /, then move the tiny amount
of new stuff, like the user directory for some new service, into
your old partiiton.)

We have a lot of boxes, so probably have more than average opportunity
to do some experimentation.  So I occasionally try upgrades across major
versions on boxes which aren't very important on a day-to-day basis.
My observations are these:

1. For primarly server-oriented configurations (no desktop/GUI
configuration), upgrades across full versions are quite successful.
This assumes that they have largely followed Redhat's distribution
and have not added in either (a) non-RPM-based stuff which
overwrites RPM-based stuff, or (b) some non-Redhat RPM's which
"derail" the Redhat RPM versioning.

2. Redhat has always made a mess of GUI configuration.
I expect to have to go in and set up my individual users
GUI preferences and will be amazed when somebody does a good
job of preserving GUI configurations for the range of
configurations which are possible.

3. In either case, you have to go in afterwords and muck with
the .rpmsave and .rpmnew files to make consistent config files
containing both (1) your old specific config info, and (2)
new generic config info not present in the old file.

4. Otherwise, I find these nearly-automatic upgrades to be much
more successful under RedHat Linux than under major versions of windoze.

> 
> This is interesting, I do upgrades all the time and I don't recall having
> problems like these. In the case of solitare, could your hardware be
> flaky? Also remember, that Red Hat hasn't written most of this software,
> they just packages it for consumption.
> 
> -james
> 
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-- 
Mark Dzmura
digital mission llc
http://www.digipath.net