On Sun, 19 May 2002, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > Eran Tromer wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > Whatever method you use, doing a full upgrade using the installer has > > a very high chance of failing in *some* way, so if you don't have > > low-level remote control facilities you'd better be prepared to come > >over anyway. > > > > If you can't do that, you may be better served by upgrading the > > specificRPM packages you need, though it's hard for some components > > due to a dense dependency network. > > > Not trying to open a holy war here, I would state the following > fact/opinions: > A. Debian seems to keep the ENTIRE system via the dpkg system.
Including configuration of packages. That is: some of the confguration options of a package can be determained at install-time and therefore be managed by the packaging system. This hopefully allows you to have less config files to upgrade manually. > B. Debian has a mechanism that allows overall update of all out of date > packages in the system. > C. The upshot of the above two is that an upgrade to a newer release is > merely changing a configuration file to specify you are now using the > new release, and telling the system to update. As Eran mentioned, it only takes one small error to stop the whole process in the middle. You may end up with a problematic system. I tried upgrading from potato to woody on four systems, and it blew up in the middle on two or of them. This is anecdotial evidence, but it means that I try to be careful. > > I have done it several times to ugrade potato to both woody and sid, > and I have never encountered any problems (the one-liner had to be > repeated several times because of packages requiring certain other > packages installed prior to their installation begining, but otherwise > all went smooth all the times). But what if the sshd had to be restarted due to glibc upgrade? What if the packet filtering settings have changed? > > Upgrading kernel is, indeed, more difficult, but not so muchso as to > prevent remote upgrade. > > My question - what other distros support remote upgrade between major > releases? I know that Mandrake has a script called "live update, which runs the installer on a live system. There are resonable chances that you'll be able to run the text-mode instaler from a remote session. As for its reliability: haven't tried it ;-) > What is the procedure? For example, why can't up2date be used > to upgrade RedHat 7.2 to 7.3? -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
