On 25 Jan 1999, Henning Makholm wrote: > Missy Batt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Everything for both Debian and Red Hat seems self referencing. How do I > > start using debian packages?... install the package dpkg. How do I > > install that? > > Well, simply put, you don't convert your system from one > distribution to another without a reinstallation. > > Debian does a fine job of 'live' upgrades between versions of itself, > but there is no hope that a live upgrade path from another > distribution can be created. The differences in the critical > basic details are too big.
I did a live upgrade from Slackware to Debian, without rebooting (not that it helps much, almost every process and daemon crashed during the libc update anyway, but I just wanted to keep my 100+ days of uptime). I don't recommend it for weak hearts and the unexperienced, though, but I did write a document explaining what I did. (For critical daemons, I could perhaps install and start libc6 versions of them before the libc5 update to avoid having them down, but this would only apply to Slackware, not Red Hat. For Red Hat, you may have hope that libc6 upgrade won't crash the daemons, like httpd.) I haven't completed the migration (what's holding me back is Slackware's pine version which is newer than Debian's), so I haven't tried replacing the basic filesystem packages (aaa_base, devs, etc, ide), but everything else is replaced by Debian equivalents. "devs" may be tricky, because I can't find which Debian package install /dev/*. When completed, I had thought of giving the document to the Debian project. If you would like to see it now, just mail me.
