At what point does an upgrade become a new system?
 

A little thought that's been going round my head over the last few days .......

In Windows, no matter how many patches and updates you apply your 95 will never be 98, 98 never ME, NT4 never 2K, etc etc.

Skipping Debian (which I think has a wonderful upgrade/update sytem - and thank god for Apt4RPM!) is there ever a point at which an updated RH8 (for example) system can be called RH9?

I may not be explaining myself very well.....there must come a point at which you've updated every single file and driver and updated Gnome/KDE/etc and your system is to all intents and purposes RH9 (as an RH user I'm using that as the example). What does the system get called? A very updated RH8 box or a kinda RH9 box?

Is it even possible, or have all my users finally blown my mind?

Well thankfully that's now out of my head and into yours!

If you've updated EVERYTHING, I suppose it can be said that you're using Red Hat 9.0. Here's a Slackware Example:

There is a great little program called swaret. You can use it to update ALL of your packages. Next, you'd have to update your kernel(Just download the new one). Oh, and make sure and create/edit /etc/slackware_version ^_^

I think I know what you mean... You sort of have to evaluate it package by package... OpenSSH-3.1p1-6 on RedHat 7.2 is the same as OpenSSH-3.1p1-6 on RedHat 7.3. If you use up2date religiously, you can keep your packages on your RedHat 7.2 machine as current (or sometimes even more current) than an out of the box RedHat 9 install. The main difference between different releases is the versions of the packages included, and secondarily, the inclusion of more packages that didn't exist in previous releases - this is where RH7.2 could never *quite* be RH9.

Yeah, that's what I thought. I suppose to make 7.2 into 9 you'd have to list all of the files packages in both (or at least diff!) and install whatever isn't in 7.2.

But that sounds like a lot of work and who wants to go through all that, eh?

The way to change versions in redhat is to download and manually install the rpm called: redhat-release-<version>. Then you have officially changed your versions, even if you are out-of-date. If you use the redhat up2date system (works fine on off-hours, Sunday morning for instance), up2date will update all your files for you to the current level of the new version. If you try this though, I would put the files in a local directory and use the -k option. Make sure the filesystem containing /var/up2date has enough room (perhaps you can put them in that location?) and that if you use a CD to get the RPMs, that it is a newly released version. Use a mirror to download the most current files.

I've found this works much better than the RH supplied CD upgrade method which is in my opinion (last I tried it) is broken. Partly because I require a custom kernel.

You can also use "up2date -p;up2date -l" to update your version with the RH network and then get a list of the RPM's you need. You could then use rpm to install them, however, the installation is somewhat order dependent, so be careful and study up first.