Scott, On Sunday 17 April 2005 08:28, Scott Leighton wrote:
I know that a lot of people recommend simply doing a clean install instead of an upgrade when moving from one SuSE release to a new one, but I really prefer not to loose all of the tweaking and settings to the various config files in /etc so I've always used the upgrade route.
I can see both sides of this issue, but consider, too, that a clean install also frees you from a lot of cruft that tends to build up in a long-running installation. I don't know about you, but as conservative as I try to be about trying new things, there's a certain amount of stuff I've installed that turned out to be buggy or unuseful. And for those things that are not installed via RPM, it can be pretty hard to eradicate it all. A fresh install guarantees a clean break. Naturally, I'm absolutely not talking about overwriting your existing installation. If you must to that, then at least be sure to back up those file systems / disk partitions that will be overwritten. If possible (based on space requirements), mirror the key configuration files on a CD or DVD first (so you don't need to run your backup / restore software to access them). I both look forward to and feel trepidation about the 9.3 installation I'm planning now. I'm buying a new hard disk to host it and I'll just bite the bullet about replicating all the essential add-ons and customizations I've done since I performed my SuSE 9.1 installation (that was done from scratch, too, because of an untimely disk crash that wiped out a then-young 9.0 installation). My /home directory is a separate partition in my current setup. In the new setup, I think I'll devote a partition to /usr/local, too. On my current system /usr/local already contains over 2 GB of stuff I've added.
The move from 9.2 to 9.3 was a little bumpy for me (see earlier thread), but the biggest pita I'm finding (now that the bumps are smoothed over thanks to help from this list) is the Perl upgrade.
None of the modules I previously installed via CPAN get installed when a newer Perl is installed. That means that all sorts of things break and stop working and I find myself chasing around installing various modules as I find the problems.
The only way I can think of to deal with this is to keep a log of software (especially 3rd-party and non-RPM software) added to your system subsequent to installation of the vendor's distribution. It's also important to record lower-level things like disk partitions, Webmin configuration changes, NTP and DNS server addresses, IP addresses, virtual adaptors as well as user IDs and so on. When in doubt, jot it down. I've not done this in the past, and I'm going to give it a try this time around. In a year or so when I decide to go with another install, I won't have to spend so much time reverse engineering my own system!
There has to be a better way. Does anyone know of a straightforward method to identify the modules I installed to Perl 5.8.5 and then to automatically get them installed for the newer 5.8.6 that 9.3 uses? I'm thinking like maybe some kind of script that could be run.
CPAN obviously records what it has installed somehow, somewhere. On my system, it appears to be in /usr/local/.cpan (I don't know if that's a stock location or if I chose it). Use "locate" (or, perchance, the CPAN documentation itself?) to find its installation log and / or configuration files. You can no doubt short-circuit or at least simplify an exhaustive trial-and-error process of recovering the packages needed by the Perl applications you're using. Keep in mind, too, that in some cases, you'll need newer versions of things you added to your existing system to be compatible with stock software included in the distribution. To the extent that this is true, there's another advantage to a clean install. Good luck. Let us know how you address these problems and what your experience is. I'll do the same.
Scott
Randall Schulz