[since it seems that sympa doesn't like CCs, I'll send two separate
copies of this message to cooker and expert]

I had some minor and some not so minor issues upgrading from 9.1 to 9.2
on a test machine (my company laptop) using the method outlined by Buchan at
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7018

If someone feels I should add this information to some wiki page please
tell me where (no, I won't find the location by myself, sorry, I find
wikis difficult to use and never find the information I'm looking for).

Since most of the issues are with urpmi I hope this report is useful to
correct them (this is why I'm posting this to cooker). Next week I'll
try the update on my main machine (and hopefully put the test machine on
cooker), so if you find this report missing or incomplete plese tell me
what should I do to give more useful details.

I added a couple of steps of my own to Buchan's method: I took a list of
all the packages before the update (rpm -qa | sort | > rpms.mdk91) and
after (rpm -qa | sort | > rpms.mdk92). Using these lists I could see
which packages weren't updated by urpmi --auto-select (comm -1 -2
rpms.mdk91 rpms.mdk92). More on this later.

Also, instead of using ftp/http urpmi sources, I used local sources (a
local 9.2 tree dowloaded with rsync, both main and contribs) plus an ftp
source for plf. No updates source at the moment (I'll save that for
later, I'll see if the updates are included in the 9.2 tree for the new
iso and I'll rsync the tree. Either that or download the updates so I
can use them for both machines. No lg cdroms here ;-).

I had an "operator error": the hdlist for plf was old, so urpmi couldn't
find some packages. Obviously this isn't an urpmi problem but a pebkac
one ;-)  (but the error message, or the translation, was misleading
since it told me that "all packages could be downloaded").

Let's go for a summary of the problems:

* The "urpmi urpmi" step worked well. After that I had to stop the
"urpmi --auto-select" because it was scrolling a bazillion of error
messages regarding /var/lib/rpm/PubKeys. Had to remove the file and
manually "rpm --import" the keys

* There was some conflict with files with some updated packages. Removed
the offending packages and urpmi --auto-select worked well.

* It couldn't update libavifile0.7 libaviplayavcodec (and dependent
packages) due to dependencies. I think this is a problem caused by urpmi
batching, since when I manually issued an "urpmi libavifile0.7
libaviplayavcodec" it could upgrade both flawlessly. Maybe this problem
will be more noticeable on the other machine since it has many more
packages installed.

* I had to urpmi all kde packages that weren't updated due to the
package split. Not an urpmi problem and not a big deal since I really
like the split (so I don't have to install things I don't need) but I'm
reporting it since the info could be useful to somebody that didn't
follow the issue on the various mailing lists. For the curious what I
did was:

   urpmi kdebase-konsole
   urpmi kdebase-kate
   urpmi kdepim-knotes
   urpmi kdepim-korganizer
   urpmi kdenetwork-knewsticker

* Had a problem with cyrus-imapd databases. Don't know if it's because I
screwed up with this machine (after all it's a test machine) or because
during an upgrade a db_upgrade should be done. Since the databases were
for duplicate delivery and tls sessions (thank God I used skiplist for
the useful ones) I just removed them. I'll see what happens with the
other machine where my real mail is (I'll keep my fingers crossed) (note
that this problem has nothing to do with urpmi).

* Then I compared packages before and after the upgrade

comm -1 -2 rpms-mdk91 rpms-mdk92 > not_upgraded

(to get a list of packages that weren't upgraded)

     ( for i in `not_upgraded` ; do urpmq --sources $i ; done ) 2>&1 |
grep 'cap paquet' > orphaned

     (to exclude packages that remained the same in 9.1 and 9.2, note
that 'cap paquet' is the localized string for 'no package' )

looking at the packages in "orphaned" I found mostly obsolete libs that
I subsequently removed (in fact this step was useful to perform a kind
of "spring cleaning") but there were some packages that "urpmi
--auto-select" failed to upgrade:

     gettext
     kdeutils
     screem

urpmi gettext, urpmi kdeutils, urpmi screem solved that but I'm puzzled
that urpmi --auto-select didn't find the newer versions by itself.
The versions in 9.1 were:

gettext-0.11.5-2mdk, kdeutils-3.1-9mdk, screem-0.6.0-1mdk

in 9.2:

gettext-0.11.5-7mdk, kdeutils-3.1.3-20mdk, screem-0.6.2-4mdk

Add to the list automake, but that's because of the naming (I had
automake1.6 while 9.2 has automake1.7).

* The last issue is that by rebooting (I didn't upgrade the kernel) I
had a dead machine: it couldn't find the initrd so it couldn't mount the
root directory (since it's xfs). Hopefully one of the older kernels I
had could boot, ran lilo from it and the machine went back to life. I
don't understand what happened here, really. The other machine has a
much more convoluted lilo setup, so I fear it won't be as easy to recover.

Well, I'm impressed by how well the procedure worked. Sure, there were
some hurdles and the modification in libraries versions wasn't earth
shattering (I wonder if everything would work as well with a major glibc
update) but still it's much better that what was available before. Oh,
btw, I was using the machine (logged in in X) during the whole process.
That's incredible. Kudos to mandrake developers and contributors.

Bye


-- - Yo tambi�n quiero una Europa libre de Patentes de Software - - I want a Software Patents Free Europe too! And you? - --------------------------------------------------------------- EuropeSwPatentFree - http://EuropeSwPatentFree.hispalinux.es


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