To be honest I am quite surprised at what people are saying
regarding the upgrades:
1. Occasionally yes, indeed there are some orphaned files left behind,
but you can find them easily with something like
find . -exec rpm -q -f `pwd`{} \;
(of course you can elaborate and write a script around the idea,
this is of course for rmp based distro)
2. Occasionally yes, there are few packages left behind from older distro
and not uninstalled. I have a crude perl script to check a system
for packages which are old, require patching and are duplicates
(email me if interested or write your own :-) ain't such a big deal)
3. Occasionally yes, some config files are overwritten or your config
files are saved as backup because the format has changed.
But you do backup the /etc dir, right ? (and other dirs as appropriate)
All this do happen yes but is the exception rather than the rule
and one deals with them as necessity arises.
All in all an upgrade is IMHO much, much, much faster than an reinstall
(I thought reinstalling is a MS Win disease ;-)
In 8 years of working with Linux I had to reinstall only in the
very old days of Slackware which didn't know about upgrades
(but that was at least 6 years ago!)
Cheers,
--
Ryurick M. Hristev mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Computer Systems Manager
University of Canterbury, Physics & Astronomy Dept., New Zealand
