[wplug] Managing updates

[Patrick Wagstrom]

Weber, Lawrence A wrote:
> One of my biggest problems with maintaining my Linux systems is 
> associated with updating an application.  I heavily rely on the built in 
> update manager for most updates but they seem to stop finding updates 
> when a system get to be a couple of versions old.
> 
> I find I have to manually update many of the very low level 
> applications; yesterday it was gcc.  After resolving some version 
> dependencies with other components, I  successfully compiled the new 
> version and installed it in the default location, /usr/local. 
> 
> I did this so I could test the new version without destroying my older 
> version.  Now that it works, how do I go about moving it to /bin?  There 
> are numerous components and I am concerned that a manual move will miss 
> something.  Is my only option to rebuild it with --prefix set to /bin?  
> I could leave it in /usr/local but then how do I remove ALL of the old 
> version?

Not trying to convince anyone to switch here (heck, I don't even use it), 
but conary, the package management system for foresight linux has a really 
neat feature that allows you to roll back to any previous package state. 
Basically, this means that it's a whole lot easier to install experimental 
stuff and not worry about hosing your system.

Might make an interesting future discussion if we've got any foresight 
users in WPLUG.

--Patrick