Anne Wilson wrote:
Except that doing clean installs is a real pain.
That's a problem that could be solved. Not easily, but at least it
makes an interesting problem...
Getting all the config files right again is what takes so much time after a
clean install.
Of course - but if you know where you put the old ones it is the same
problem whether you upgrade or install fresh. Maybe the program saving
the old copy would need to note whether the config was changed from the
initial rpm install or not - I'm not sure how the decision is made
during an upgrade about whether to overwrite your old version or put the
new one is as a .rpmnew and make you deal with it.
> In many cases it would be no problem to simply copy the
config file from a recent backup. I wonder if some of the pain could be
eased quite simply by pointing out in the Release Notes which packages need
important changes to the config files? I'm thinking, for instance, of when
dovecot went from 0.99 to 1.0 - where the config section for authorisation
needed changes.
I'm only thinking of significant changes like that, so I wouldn't think there
would be too many. The comfort that anything not listed there could probably
get away with the old config file could save considerable time and effort.
There's other stuff, like when the postgres database format changes and
you have to dump and reload. That would be considerably easier with
extra space to work. Then there's the stuff that fedora people don't
like to talk about - that you have to get from other repositories.
Those would work the same way as long as you could patch up the
repository list and find matching package names, but it's unlikely that
anything shipped by fedora would include the list of matching
repository names.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
