rebuilding RPMs (upgrade issues)

[greg at freephile.com (Greg Rundlett)]

(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.

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?

Thanks,

Greg

Notes:
[1]
I have a long list of third-party apps that I got from doing

# rpm -q --queryformat '%{NAME} / %{DISTRIBUTION}  / %{VENDOR} \n'
-qa|grep -v "Red Hat"


libgnomeprintui22 / (none) / (none)
flac / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
gkrellm / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
bluefish / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
xf86-corefonts / Personal Build / Custom Build
gpg-pubkey / (none) / (none)
keychain / (none) / Gentoo Technologies, Inc.
alsa-kernel / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
alsaplayer / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
libfame / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
grip / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
xcdroast / (none) / Thomas Niederreiter
libgsf / (none) / (none)
alsa-driver / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
aalib / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
cdrtools-cdda2wav / (none) / Joerg Schilling <schilling at fokus.gmd.de>
mms-mp3 / Shrike Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
IBMJava2-SDK / IBM / International Business Machines
webmin / (none) / Jamie Cameron
libgnomeprint22 / (none) / (none)
apt / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
alsa-lib / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
alsa-utils / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
nmap / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
xine-lib / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
xine / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
cdrtools-devel / (none) / Joerg Schilling <schilling at fokus.gmd.de>
ghostscript / (none) / Easy Software Products
gpg-pubkey / (none) / (none)
synaptic / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
alsa-xmms / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
nmap-frontend / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
xvidcore / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
id3lib / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
cdrtools-mkisofs / (none) / Joerg Schilling <schilling at fokus.gmd.de>
libmrproject / (none) / (none)
xosd / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
cdrtools-cdrecord / (none) / Joerg Schilling <schilling at fokus.gmd.de>
gtk2 / Elysium GNU/Linux / Elysium GNU/Linux
cssed / (none) / Iago Rubio
gpg-pubkey / (none) / (none)
mrproject / (none) / (none)
alsa-lib-devel / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net
cabextract / Psyche Freshrpms / Freshrpms.net


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