On Sunday 06 October 2002 17.30, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
I'm not so sure of that. It's almost impossible to create 100% reliable 'test cases'. You really don't know what will happen until you do things the way they will be done in production.
In this case that's not true. An "upgrade" using rpm is the same as the uninstall of the previous version followed by an install of the new. That's why you sometimes get messages like "Can't remove foo/ - directory not empty". That is the old package being "rpm -e":ed. So as far as functionality is concerned, there's absolutely no difference between putting the new beta in, say, /opt/kde3.1-beta or putting it in /opt/kde3 as a straight "upgrade". Except that in the former case you have a working installation to fall back on if the beta doesn't work.
Well, that isn't necessarily true. If someone comes up with a compatability package which keeps the old libs around in the new version, that can keep your old stuff alive. Quite often you don't know you've broken something until you actually try to run it and find out, @#^, I need the old abc.so.5 for this!
As I said, it's irrelevant to this discussion. If you allowed for that you might as well say you can run kde2 programs under kde3. You can't, but suse has a compat package that lets you do it, but that is irrelevant to the main issue. Besides, and this is a comment I wanted to make in the first place but forgot, we're supposed to be beta testing kde here, not spec files. Sure it's interesting to see if suse's rpms will work when it comes time to take the plunge, but it's not beta testing kde, it's beta testing suse's spec files. //Anders