Rough upgrade to FC4

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
> I just upgraded to FC4 from FC3 and I had some troubles that should
> not have happened.  My FC3 system was current with updates, and I used
> downloaded ISO's from fedora.  The problem was that many of the FC3
> packages were more up to date than the FC4 packages, so the upgrade
> did not install them.  This included the kernel.  I felt lucky that I
> had a workable system.
> 
> Running up2date did not help -- I was still in an FC3 system (kind of).
> 
> I manually installed the FC4 kernel and ran up2date again, but it was
> stuck on many packages, because up2date only wanted to freshen
> existing rpm's -- it didn't want to add any new ones to solve
> dependencies. 

Red Hat has taught me well.  It has been *many* years since I have 
upgraded from one release of an OS to another.  I have experienced, and 
heard of, too many horror stories.  Mostly with systems that have had 
software installed from other sources, or non-RPM software, but I've 
never seen a sufficiently useful server that had only software from it's 
maker's repository.

I always back up my data, /etc, /var, /home, and some other directories, 
nuke it from orbit, and install the new OS.  It just works, I know when 
I'm done all the software will be compatible[0], config files will match 
the new software, old crufty stuff I forgot about over a year ago won't 
continue to fill up my hard drive, and updates will continue to work.


[0] Well, except for that gcc version messiness Red Hat pulled a few 
versions ago.