On Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 05:01:48PM +0100, Luca Olivetti wrote: > Well, I don't think that an "install only, no upgrade possible" policy > is acceptable. An upgrade should work as well as a new install. > Hopefully you're not right: it seems that urpmi is approaching apt in > functionality, making operations like apt-get --dist-upgrade possible > (though it didn't work for me when I tested debian).
In an ideal world you would be able to upgrade just fine. But this is not an ideal world. Config files change. Upgrades no matter how carefully coded can go wrong, especially when changing from one binary incompatable version to another. A perfect example of where upgrades go wrong is the ECN issue we had a while back. A user upgraded an older (think it was 8.0 box) to 9.0. Suddenly his ECN was turned on, which meant he couldn't get to some websites. 9.0 ships with a sysctl.conf that has this turned off. But his 8.0 did not. So since RPM will not overwrite config files, he didn't get the directive to turn it off. In this situation either way you go you'll run into issues. If you replace config files, you'll have unhappy people complaining that their configs were ovewritten and that they would have worken just fine. If you don't then you'll have people with issues because of their configs. What has been done is the best intermediate situation that can. Configs get upgraded so long as the config file that was installed by the current RPM has not been changed. So basically upgrades will always be a crap shoot. There is no way you can possibly test every imagineable change that a user can make to their config with the latest version. -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion only of her own." -- John Quincy Adams, July 4th, 1821
