[PLUG] A _Red Hat_ upgrade question

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Fedor G. Pikus wrote:

> I don't think it did that, if the upgrade is restarted you do it from
> scratch. But it does know what you currently have, and a typical upgrade
> will just take the list of installed packages and upgrade them, so you
> should not have to select anything as a part of the upgrade.
> If you want to change your system configuration significantly, do it after
> the upgrade. Aftermy upgrades, I used to go through the upgrade log, see
> what packages I have, remove those I don't really want, check
> configuration files it updated, and did other cruft removal (there is
> nothing in the upgrade process itself which makes it necessary or any
> easier than at any other time, but since I was already doing maintenance,
> it looked like a sensible occasion).

  Thanks, Fedor. The reason I wouldn't be comfortable letting the installer
see what's there and doing its thing unmonitored is that certain critical --
or useful -- packages are not detected and marked for installation. And,
almost all KDE and Gnome packages _are_ marked for "upgrade" although
they're not on the system now. Makes no sense, but that's the way it is.
 
> However, I have to say that after RH7.1 I stopped using upgrades at all.
> I now use apt-rpm to upgrade all myu RedHat boxes. Get it from
> http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/ or from freshrpm's, edit the sources file,
> you can add your RH7.3 CDs to the "repository" (it has a command for
> that), and upgrade away.

  I will certainly grab this and give it a shot. I'm now downloading another
copy of the disk 1 iso because the other one has an apparently corrupt
package that won't install. I _thought_ I had checked the md5 sum before
burning it onto a disk, but I must not have done so.

  Excellent advice that I will take.

Rich