Well, my Dad runs stable Mandrake releases on his system. He was quite eager to get onto 9.1, so since the .ISOs are delayed we decided to update his system using urpmi with Cooker sources. I took charge of doing this tonight.
Overall, I can broadly say...it worked. Good marks for that :). But, there were some gotchas along the way. First of all there was rather an annoying problem with openSSL. When I just did an --auto-select, it failed due to missing "openssl-devel". I *think* the problem is the 0.96 (9.0) and 0.97 (9.1) packages don't work well together, and the --auto-select was just planning on removing the 0.96 packages (or at least the devel package) without updating to the 0.97 packages. My workaround was to download and install the 0.97 packages manually. This caused problems itself, though - manually removing the old packages I had to use --nodeps, and it couldn't then install the new packages with urpmi because both curl and wget rely on openssl. So I had to download the new packages with ncftp and manually install them, then download the wget package and manually install it. Further, installing the new openssl packages required the new glibc version, which seemed to cause problems for the 9.0 programs - I couldn't use rpm -Uvh any more, for instance, but fortunately urpmi still worked. This is a bit of a mess that I can see being a problem for anyone trying to update via urpmi. Secondly, urpmi is still not quite good enough for doing a between-versions upgrade entirely automatically, because of the problem of adding new packages. It installed several config files which expected the Galaxy theme packages, but of course it didn't install these, I had to do it manually. I also manually installed the zcip and tmdns packages, because it seems these are necessary for 9.1 machines to work as simple network clients - if you try and set up a system with drakconnect without these packages installed, it tries to install them (which obviously doesn't work if you only have network sources :>). If using urpmi to update is to become a recommended path, as I believe some people have discussed, I propose it needs some kind of way of taking into account "highly recommended" new packages in the new version like this. Overall, though, I was very impressed - after I worked around these niggles, it happily updated the entire distribution (over 600 packages). I tweaked the surprisingly few config files that installed as .rpmnew, installed the new Cooker kernel, rebooted and there was 9.1, in all its glory! Good stuff, it's nice that this pretty much works now :). -- adamw
