Brendan Conoboy wrote:
1) Use the upgrade option.
Is that supported?
AFAIK, yes. The only "iffy" upgrade mechanism is to online update
fedora-release then use yum to handle the package upgrade for you
(Though this generally works fine for me)
And is this documented as being supported?
>> Is there any historical evidence for this? Surely there have been
unix-like systems that have defaulted to a different partitioning
scheme before. And certainly some that performed version upgrades
without reformatting.
Friendly version upgrades (much less installations) are a relatively new
phenomenon.
For free things, perhaps.
Everything other than Linux/*BSD that I can recall using
would format and reinstall. SunOS, for instance, would normally have
partitions for /, /usr, /var, /tmp, /opt, and more. Sometimes I think
the desire to add more partitions to Linux systems stems from the
superstition formed in the days before large hard drives were common
(that does not appear to be the case in this thread).
I remember doing an tape upgrade of AT&T 3b2's from SysVr2 to SysVr3
that automatically fixed up all of the (moderately large) differences
in the installed version and came up with everything working the same -
well over a decade ago. The only machine that had a problem was one
where I had too many things starting automatically out of inittab for
the updated process limit.
Apple OS-X upgrades have also been fairly painless - and they also have
a nice strategy for migrating to a new machine. All macs will act as
firewire targets, so you just connect your new machine to the old one
and it sees it as a firewire drive and offers to migrate your users,
applications and data over, taking care of version differences on the
fly. This also works if you have done a backup to an external firewire
drive, re-installed the OS, then want to migrate your old setup back.
A tool like this might be the friendliest long term solution if you
could design something that would do a backup of your existing system to
an external drive or a network destination in a format that could either
be used to restore the existing system or as the source for migrating
users, data, and non-packaged applications (i.e. your /opt and
/usr/local/) back into a freshly installed newer version. That would
require some additional space somewhere but could be pretty flexible and
would eliminate any partitioning dependencies.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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