On Saturday 02 February 2008 12:31:43 pm Henry Lafleur wrote:
So besides the possibility of minor inconveniences such as what I saw with Red Hat, what exactly is so terrible about upgrading Suse to make it not recommended and not supported? If I do a full system backup prior, can't I just do a tar to restore my system back (as I did before when my HD crashed)? Are lawyers making you say this or something?
As someone who has done several version upgrades with openSUSE, I wouldn't recommend them for the faint-of-heart, but they're certainly not catastrophically difficult. The single biggest challenge is having to manually reconcile dependencies in Yast when updating the packages. This can be minimized to a certain extent by first ensuring that all third-party packages are removed from the system, particularly ones such as Guru or Packman that replace core components. The method I've always used in the past was to simply replace my sources in Yast to point to the new version of openSUSE, as well as the guru, packman repos etc., and then launch Yast -> System Update. There would still be dependencies to resolve, but if you're familiar with your system, it's manageable. I've also run into quirks from updating similar to the ones you ran into with RH, but again nothing insurmountable with even a bit of knowledge of openSUSE linux. At the end of the day, I simply find clean installs easier now. I keep my /home on a separate partition, and I backup my /etc directory to a temp directory in my home partition, in case I need to reference any specific system settings I had previously changed. I think the issue with supporting upgrades is that due to the wide variety of system configurations, there is the possibility for too many corner cases or scenarios that cannot possibly be accounted for, so providing support across the board isn't really viable. Anyways, just like compiling your own kernel, you can't expect the openSUSE team to support any issues you have with it, but it's certainly doable and there's nothing inherent in openSUSE that would prevent you from doing so. Just be prepared to roll up your sleeves if anything breaks. Just my 2c... Cheers, KV --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org