On Sun, 30 May 2010, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > On Sun, 2010-05-30 at 08:19 -0500, Michael Hennebry wrote: >> On Sun, 30 May 2010, N James Bridge wrote: >> >>> Personally, I prefer to do a clean install, since it gets rid of >>> accumulated clutter. That assumes you have a convenient way of backing >>> up your /home directory. >> >> I back up regardless. >> If you have a /home partition and do a custom install, >> you can tell fedora not to mess with it. >> Changes in the formats of .files can cause problems though. >> Another way is to preserve a /user-data partition. >> /home can be in the / partition. >> When a user gets a spanking new home directory, >> he can add a soft link into /user-data. > > If I understand what you're saying, this means that all the dot-files > holding the user's config info also get thrown away. Or did you mean > something different? That is what I meant. It's one reason I rarely upgrade much before EOL on what I already have. > <rant> (somewhat OT) > Changes in dot-files are a source of obscure problems, and it may be > that refreshing them all is the sensible way to go, but IMHO it's a > kludge. It should not be necessary to do this, and the fact that it It's the obscurity that makes it really nasty. I've only run into it once, but that was enough. Instead of spitting out an error message where I would see it, the app just blundered on. It's mentioned in the list somewhere. > sometimes is means that app-writers aren't doing their job. If a config > file changes format between versions, the app should be able to parse > the old file and convert it to the new format, or if it can't do so > because of some basic change in funcionality, then warn the user to do > it by hand. I'm frankly amazed that more people don't complain about > this. We seem to think that it's "natural" or "inevitable". It's not. No > Windows or MacOS user would sit still for this, and I don't see Linux > users should have to put up with it. > </rant> -- Michael hennebry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx "Pessimist: The glass is half empty. Optimist: The glass is half full. Engineer: The glass is twice as big as it needs to be." -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
