I have been a fan of Slackware since I bought the CD set of Slackware 8 many years ago. From time to time though, I like to upgrade my Linux to the "latest and greatest".

Each time in the past, I have simply swallowed hard, formatted the disk and re-installed everything from scratch, including the development projects I am involved in at the time (usually Perl, MySQL, Apache web-based applications).

However...

I am now at a point that full re-installation of all my stuff could really get painful with all the customization I have had to do to Perl (perl package installs & configuration), MySQL (several databases), and Apache (lots of customized modules).

I hope this isn't a stupid question, but I've already looked around the forums and even at www [dot] slackware [dot] com and can find no answers.

I would like to be able to simply "upgrade" my Linux system from Slackware 10.1 to 12.0 directly without having to re-install and re-configure everything from scratch all over again.

Now, I do have my /home and /usr/local/ installations and I know they won't change, so that's fine.

However, there are so many changes in the /etc directory and even in the /usr/lib/perl5 directory (custom CPAN module installations) that I'm not sure an "upgrade" is really possible.

Does ANYBODY have an idea how to do this, or am I just doomed to "wipe and re-install" as I've done in the past?

Thanks for any help offered,
Tom

Wipe & reinstall.
And... next time create packages of everything you install (use cpan2tgz for your CPAN modules) and document what you configure. Your MySQL databases can be dumped to disk and re-imported in the new installation.

Eric