SEO

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

On May 4, 5:47 am, Peter <pe...@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.

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.

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

On Sun, 4 May 2008, Peter wrote:

>
> 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?

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.

We also used to have RH, RHEL and CentOS boxes, there upgrades always
meant downtime, then there were always corrpution which meant more
downtime, (I've also heard similar with debian) hence why we now only
use Slackware exclusively, cept for a couple of remaining slowaris boxes
which will be gone soon too.



--
Cheers
Res

I read usenet and lists in pine. But m$ outlook, thunderbird and gmail
often use html span/whatever for quotes, makes it hard to tell who said
what, so I dont try. If I ignore you, thats why! Use a compliant mailer.

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

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/ >

On Mon, 05 May 2008 10:21:08 +0000, Giovanni wrote:

> 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

Thank you for the suggestion. Saves a lot of time and angst!



--
Peter

On Mon, 05 May 2008 10:21:08 +0000, Giovanni wrote:

snip...
>
> 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

Thank you very much. I followed your suggestion with the dry-run
parameter. I was very please to see that I could easily identify my
packages because I use a standard suffix -1pe for all my packages and I
could easily grep them. Turns out a lot of my packages were added, not
updates to stock packages. Others were brought to the same or higher
version by Slackware.

I will probably get to it over the weekend, but it looks like it will not
be a big deal.

Thanks again.



--
Peter