On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:59 PM, Marc Chamberlin <marc@marcchamberlin.com> wrote:

On 3/18/2013 11:01 AM, Jan Ritzerfeld wrote:

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Am Sonntag, 17. März 2013, 22:12:50 schrieb Marc Chamberlin:

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I have been running an openSuSE 11.4 system with a number of server applications such as Tomcat, James, Bacula etc., and decided it was time I upgrade it to 12.3. I have always followed a model of keeping /home in it's own partition and installing each new version of openSuSE into it's own partition.

I am doing the same. I updated to 12.3 this weekend.

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In this way, my thinking was that I could keep running the older version of openSuSE until I get all the servers and configuration files (found in /etc /srv and elsewhere) upgraded and running under the newer version of openSuSE. That model has always worked in the past and I thought openSuSE developers would continue to adhere to that model as well... [...]

I am not a "openSUSE developer" but I always clearly stated, when being asked or when I advised a KDE update, that you should not do that. You should backup your old /home. You should never go back after KDE has updated and migrated(!) its configuration and databases. If it worked for you in the past, it was pure luck.

Sorry Jan

Thanks Jan for replying. I guess that makes it even harder to do upgrades of openSuSE. I wish the openSuSE developers/designers, along with the Linux community in general, would give some more thought and directions on how we users are suppose to be able to migrate to newer releases of an OS while at the same time being able to regress back to previous releases when we have to. Having to maintain separate /home directories-partitions for each release would be a major PITA because of the divergences that will happen, and keeping data synchronized between them (can you say mail databases for example?) while running under different versions of openSuSE.

Some of us poor users don't have the luxury of setting up separate servers and client computers when migrating from one OS to the next, and must do it in place. And getting a new system up and running takes time and we cannot afford to have our computers down during production/work hours, so the migration process can take a long time to complete. I know, I been through this process quite a few times now. I have a few tricks in place that help, for example I yank a lot of stuff out of /etc for different server configurations files and link them back in to versioned directories (in a separate partition which then retains configuration files for running the servers under different versions of openSuSE as well as different versions of the servers themselves.) Guess I will have to start doing something similar for the /home directories and figure out what stuff KDE/openSuSE is likely to touch and yank that stuff out to a separate partition with versioned directories as well. Either way it is a PITA and I wish there was a well defined (and adhered to) model for laying out partitions and directories so we can easily support regressing back when it is necessary to do so.

:-( -- Chris -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org