Hi, I'm a linux newbie. I know most of the basic commands I guess, and I've read the LFS 6.0 book and even built it multiple times. ( YAY me ) Now after I have my brand spanking new LFS system running ( which I'm pretty proud of ), I start reading the BLFS book. To my surprise ( a rather bad one ), it is recommended that LFS be rebuilt if there is a minor upgrade to the toolchain package. I'm not too sure how fast these upgrades are released but I'm kind of zoned out hearing it. So lets say now I start reading/learning/installing various package from BLFS, and 3-4 months down the line, I have it configured how I want, using it how I want and then a new upgrade for a package comes out. It is ( highly? ) recommended that I rebuild the LFS system. Which probably means all the other things I installed, I need to reinstall too. I'm kind of tired of reinstalling stuff over and over ( did it when I was crazier but kind of settled down ). I've also read the package management system, but I figured if I had to rebuild LFS, the package management system would probably do me squat anyway.

So I guess my question would be, is there any way to just install on top of the existing packages? Sort of like how M$ just overwrites a new patch/version over the existing one. Or would that break the system? Any hints, suggestion, expierences?

Well, most things you can overwrite without many problems (but its not guaranteed). The things you will likely want to upgrade often, such as kde and gnome, install in prefix /opt. that way when you want to remove them, just delete /opt/kde or /opt/gnome and rebuild the packages and install. As for package management, I've always used the slackware tools and checkinstall. Other than that, the base should be good for a while with glibc-2.3.4 and gcc-3.4.1.

I prefer the package archive sort of installation. I just DESTDIR the make install into some temp directory strip and bzip2 any man/info files and then make a tar.bz2 of it and then install it. There's some packages you have to watch out for though, like the gnome packages, since make install does some extra stuff like install schemas.