Hi David, > > > The drakautoinst method I'm imagining would avoid all the > issues and (most > > of the) complications involved with using urpmi (or apt-get or similiar > > program) to "upgrade" an installation. In terms of package > management the > > I've been trying that method more or less with success for many > different dist upgrades. The idea is to pop in a new distro CD (I > first tried it with Red Hat, despite warnings), cd to the new RPMS > directory, and then do 'rpm -Uvh *'. Grabs everything off of the CD > that you already have and upgrades it. That's the way it's intended to > work, but it doesn't always work that way. >
The difference, however, is that my scheme doesn't run an upgrade on your current setup. It runs the *installer* and does a _fresh install_. It's goal is to leave you with a completely new install with roughly the same complement of software that you had installed before you started. There may well be omissions due to a package changing its name in the newer release but the tool would log that fact and allow you to handle it afterwards. Such a tool could let you do a dry run before running the actual install that would build the map of equivalent packages and let you resolve the conflicts or omissions ahead of time. If you stick with the package groups that Mandrake defines (Development, Databases, etc.) and never add software after you install then you're already halfway there since the packages that comprise those groups tend not to change radically from one release to another (not that I've noticed anyway). Certainly there are lots of details that I'm overlooking. Simple ideas are rarely as simple in practice but I think it's worth Mandrake thinking about. cheers, ::mark
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