Upgrading releases with URPMI?
 

Hi,

I was wondering, has anyone had any luck upgrading between Mandrake releases using URPMI and changing the source lists? I have found one website where a guy talks about how he successfully upgradedfrom 9.1 to 9.2, but it involved a good deal of work outside of URPMI.

I realize that URPMI was not designed for this, but wonder if anyone has gotten it to work. I am testing out Mandrake now after taking a year or so off from it, and would really like something that I could upgrade between releases with as easily as I can in Debian with apt-get dist-upgrade.

Thanks!

I understand why people want to upgrade but it usually depends on the amount of customization. Keep in mind the configuration files and such can change between different software versions. This makes the whole concept of upgrading quite challenging. I've found that Solaris does a pretty good job at doing but it takes about 2 hours to complete an upgrade. Since I never know what I'll get afterwords, I prefer to archive my home directory and config files and re-install. I've found it to be quicker and it cleans out the extra crap.

Cheers.

Yes, I do realize that configurations change. However, upgrading using a command is easier and less time-consuming than downloading an ISO, burning it, then reinstalling that way. I'd much rather prefer typing a few commands.

That said, has anyone had any success with this using urpmi?

There is a lot to be said for the concept of upgrading but my personal experience says the convience is false economy. If something goes wrong during the upgrade you could easily spend twice as much time fixing the problem. I do know that Mandrake was especially keen for testers to beat up the upgrade feature and they did spend a significant amount of time on it for the current version.

My first Mandrake DVD was bad so my replacement should arrive this week. Since I'm getting a Plextor PX-708A for Christmas, I'll be giving it a go during the holidays. I'll probably still end up starting over just because experience tells me that upgrades inevitably leave stuff behind.

Cheers.

I can say that I've happily done this twice without problems.

One of the boxes was running fetchmail, postfix, spamassassin, and apache and they didn't miss a beat. (Okay, urpmi is smart enough to stop and start your services. One beat.)

Backup your personal files and have at it. Apparently it doesn't always work, but if you've backed up there is no harm in failing, and great convenience in succeeding.

Always install over an upgrade
 

In almost every OS environment it is always better to install a newer version over upgrading. This has been and is true with winblows and linux. This is due to the fact that files can change and cause somethings not to work along with other resons for this happening. Not to mention the fact of old files being left behind, all reasons to say why bother.

I back up what I want backed up such as personal files, config files, etc. then I just do a fresh install, no fuss no muss, then I restore what I backed up. I can have this system installed and back to where it was before the reinstall in an hour or less.

I have sucessfully upgraded from 9.1 to 9.2 but there were a few problems which a fresh install didn't have (which is what I ended up doing.) I'd imagine if you didn't have any non-main packages that it would not be as much of a problem (i had plf, texstar packages), but I can't say for sure. To me this is best used with Cooker (the unstable development branch) to keep up to date.

Thanks everyone for your input. Every time I have gone to a newer version to date, I have done a fresh install. I have found this to be especially necessary with Windows. However, I just want to see what urpmi is capable of. And if it works well, then why not use it? If it doesn't work, I can use an old backup of my home directories and do a complete reinstall that way. There is no harm in trying to upgrade over an existing installation.

mac_phil, how exactly did you upgrade? Did you have to change your sources.list to point to a repository for the newer version you were upgrading to? And then was it just urpmi --auto-select ?? Or did you have to install a few packages manually?

No, nothing needed manual installation in my case. You've got the procedure.

Change urpmi sources to the distro you want. urpmi --auto-select. Then wait for quite awhile.

No need to reboot unless you change kernels. If you want to do that, urpmi kernel, then pick the one you want.

One tip I did get from some people on the mandrake mailing lists is that after you update your urpmi sources to then urpmi urpmi (so you have the latest) before doing urpmi --auto-select. Thought I'd pass that on. :)

Okay cool. I will have to try this out and see how well it works.

Thanks for the tip about updating urpmi also. I probably wouldn't have thought of doing that myself.

When I have upgraded via urpmi, or upgraded to cooker I always:

#urpmi.update -a && urpmi --auto-select --no-verify-rpm --auto

Cooker worked OK upgradeing 9.1 to 9.2 was troublesome.