From: alkos333 on
On May 4, 5:47 am, Peter <pe...(a)localhost.com> wrote:
> I have never upgraded in place a Slackware installation. I always
> installed the upgrade on a new partition and rebuilt all the
> customizations. I did this for all the obvious reasons, but most important
> because I have upgraded and/or recompiled versions or customizations of
> some stock packages and I was concerned of overwriting them.
>
> Nonetheless, I wanted comments about user experience with the in place
> upgrade. I'm backing up the / partition now, but wanted to see how others
> liked or disliked the experience.
>
> TIA
>
> --
> Peter

Went very smoothly every time. Just read UPGRADE.TXT and
CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT before or while you are upgrading and you
should be ok.
From: slakmagik on
On 2008-05-04 Sun 06:47:27, Peter wrote:
> I have never upgraded in place a Slackware installation. I always
> installed the upgrade on a new partition and rebuilt all the
> customizations. I did this for all the obvious reasons, but most important
> because I have upgraded and/or recompiled versions or customizations of
> some stock packages and I was concerned of overwriting them.
>
> Nonetheless, I wanted comments about user experience with the in place
> upgrade. I'm backing up the / partition now, but wanted to see how others
> liked or disliked the experience.
>

I can't speak to all possible configurations and I tend to follow
-current most of the time on most machines but when I do upgrade
releases, like you, I originally did complicated painful things to
upgrade and came to simply upgrade in place and have had no problems
with it. Just follow UPGRADE.TXT and the ChangeLog/CHANGE_AND_HINTS
carefully. Your config files (with the .new mechanism) should generally
be safe and non-slack packages should of course be safe. If you have a
customized package of something that is already in Slackware, it'll only
do what you tell it - give it the precise command(s) of what you do and
don't want to upgrade. At worst, if you have the tgz laying around,
reinstalling the individual package(s) would probably be simpler than
trying to migrate/recreate the whole system separately.

In short: good experiences; I recommend it.

The only downside is that it doesn't have that squeaky clean feeling
with the fresh new-system scent. ;)
From: Peter on
On Sun, 04 May 2008 19:39:12 +0000, slakmagik wrote:

snip.
>
> In short: good experiences; I recommend it.
>
> The only downside is that it doesn't have that squeaky clean feeling
> with the fresh new-system scent. ;)

Thank you both. I expected as much. I worry b/c I have upgraded many
packages manuallym including glibc and gtk+ (for gnome mostly) and don't
want to create dependency hassles.

The fresh new scent is something I don't relish b/c it means days of
recompiling. I'm backed up and maybe I'll give it a go.

Anyone with a not so pristine experience?

--
Peter
From: Peter on
On Mon, 05 May 2008 10:11:35 +1000, Res wrote:

snip...
>
> I've been doing it for many releases now, without a single glitch except
> for when Pat split some packages when he released 12.0, but the changes
> and upgrade file clearly stated this and what to do, so, so long as you
> follow the information, you wont have any hassles, I've been using
> slapt-get for distro upgrade for a long time, best thing is there is no
> need for downtime on production servers, a simple 1 min reboot to make
> the new version active.
>

snip...

OK, one final question.

What happens when I do upgradepkg --install-new for a package group, but I
have several installed that are newer? Will my newer packages be
overwritten? For example, I have glib2 2.16.3 installed yet Slackware 12.1
has version 2.14.6. When I upgrade the 'l' directory, will that get
overwritten?

Thanks again for all your feedback

--
Peter
From: Giovanni on
On 05/05/08 11:46, Peter wrote:

> What happens when I do upgradepkg --install-new for a package
> group, but I have several installed that are newer? Will my newer
> packages be overwritten? For example, I have glib2 2.16.3 installed
> yet Slackware 12.1 has version 2.14.6. When I upgrade the 'l'
> directory, will that get overwritten?

Yes it will be overwritten. upgradepkg does not look for newer
packages but only for different versions.

I usually run upgradepkg with the option --dry-run to build a batch of
the packages that will be upgraded or not. Then I remove from the
list the ones I don't want upgraded.

Ciao
Giovanni
--
A computer is like an air conditioner,
it stops working when you open Windows.
Registered Linux user #337974 < http://giovanni.homelinux.net/ >