rebuilding RPMs (upgrade issues)

[Fred]

On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 09:59, Greg Rundlett wrote:
> (note to Marc:  I *am* using Debian - at home. ;-)  This is my 
> workstation at work, and so I'm kinda wedded to RH b/c I don't want to 
> switch the other machines over, and I don't want to run a bunch of 
> different environments at once.)
> 
> I upgraded by system from RH8 to FC2.  The upgrade complained about 
> 3rd-party packages that might conflict with packages that are included 
> with FC2.  Since I was unable to determine exactly what was 
> conflicting[1], I decided to upgrade anyway and deal with the issues 
> after the upgrade.  It didn't work as well as I had hoped.  Quanta 
> crashes on startup, Mozilla has crashed on me, MySQL server wasn't 
> upgraded, or the init scripts still point to the old server.  So now I'm 
> trying to figure out the best way to go from here.
> 
> I think my two options are:
> A) Reinstall FC2, wiping out the existing installation.  After 
> installation, restore all my configuration files, mail, server settings 
> etc from backups.  This would like take the better part of the day.

I think this is your best option because upgrades across multiple
revisions typically don't work well, anyway. There are significant
changes between RH8 and RH9, RH9 and FC1, and FC1 and FC2. Going from
RH8 to FC2 is, IMHO, ill-advised. The time you spend installing a
*fresh* OS and reinstalling your apps, config files, etc. will be well
worth it. Your problems will be *much* easier to track down, should any
arise. You won't have to worry if they botched the upgrade from RH8 --
if indeed any testing of that upgrade path has been done at all.

> B) Uninstall each 3rd-party package, and re-install it from those 
> provided by RedHat.  This option I'm less familiar with so maybe it's 
> not an option.  For example, if I do a rpm -e libgnomeprint22, it errors 
> telling me that there are a bunch of other things that rely on this 
> package.  So, knowing that, how do you do it right?  Do you force the 
> uninstall and then re-install libgnomeprint22.  Or can you do it all in 
> one step with the --replacepkgs option?
> rpm -ivh --replacepkgs 
> /mnt/cdrom/Fedora/RPMS/libgnomeprint22-2.6.0-1.i386.rpm
> 
> Does anyone have an opinion on which path will most likely achieve an 
> upgraded system with the least amount of pain?

I recall having problems just going from RH8 to RH9. I personally would
strongly urge (A). 

-- 
Fred -- fred at lrc.puissante.com -- place "[hey]" in your subject.
There are inflows and outflows -- and you're just a little node.
Know then, what transcendental sets have you.