On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 07:29:03PM -0500, Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 6:43 PM, Dennis Gallien
wrote: On Wednesday, December 07, 2011 11:34 AM Lars Müller wrote: [ 8< ] I've also done upgrades rather than fresh installs for a long time, including skipping over releases. Fresh installs with keeping a separate /home partition can work well, but like an upgrade, if there are really major changes there can still be a lot of difficulties. Given that, and how much I hate migrating my /home data if I have to do a 100% fresh install, what has worked best for me:
I use the DVD, not zypper. This provides more granular control. And, even though it is time consuming, in YaST Software Management I can manually reconcile package inconsistencies which zypper might struggles with. Worst case, if there is something that cannot be resolved, I know what it is and probably why, and can be prepared to deal with it later.
YaST makes use of libzypp which is used by? Yes, zypper too.
But most importantly, I would never do a leapfrog upgrade like you are considering - 3 releases - without running a simulation first. And have a good backup. You don't want get stuck in the middle of an upgrade, or worse yet, have it altogether crap out and be left with a badly inconsistent system. It might not even restart. And then you would definitely be doing a fresh install.
libzypp now downloads packages in advance. To speed up the process I usually attach an extral drive with a copy of the required repositories to the system I'm going to upgrade.
When you do a zypper dup from version to version, there is %post_install logic for a log of packages that migrates the ondisk format of data from one version to the next.
This is not limited an uograde process from version to version. YOu might even skip one or more in between. But it must be quite clear that the bigger the gap is the higher the risk cause to a changed configuration file is.
It is designed and tested to work one release at a time. Even then I've had problems with samba as an example not quite getting the migration right.
And the bug ID of this issue is? Please include as much as possible information as you have available. Was this an issue to one of the TDB files?
There is no way in the world I would try jumping 3 versions at once. There are sure to be migration steps that get dropped by that and you end up dead.
I would upgrade from 11.2 => 11.3 => 11.4 => 12.1
Yes, this is the way with the lowest risk potential.
And at each release step I would test your main functionalities and fix any errors you find related to file formats before moving to the next one.
Or file bbug reports. Have I said before filing bug reports and sharing experience by this way I consider as quite important? ;) Lars -- Lars Müller [ˈlaː(r)z ˈmʏlɐ] Samba Team SUSE Linux, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany