On Thursday 25 October 2007 12:42, Aniruddha wrote: > I am trying to learn as much as I can about openSUSE, however there > is one crucial design philosophy I have difficulty to grasp; openSUSE > way of handeling updates. I wonder: > > -Which ways are there to update openSUSE from one stable release to > another?
The installer is designed for either fresh installation (ignoring any existing one) or an upgrade installation, which is done incrementally w.r.t. an existing installation. You make an explicit selection of which mode early on when running the installer. > -Is it also possible to skip a release when updating? e.g. is it > possible to update 10 to 10.3 or 9 to 10.2? It is, but see below. I recall one person recently mentioning here (this list) successfully doing a 10.0 -> 10.3 upgrade. More below. > - Is there also an incremental stable (not factory) update > possibility? This would mean that when openSUSE 11 is released > openSUSE 10.3 users have already updated to 11 incrementally meaning > no need for upgrading. Here are some of my perspectives, views and opinions. They are neither authoritative, definitive nor official. - The view long held by those among us inclined to be conservative about system stability and integrity have generally had a strong preference for using only clean installs, not upgrades. - I think it's likely (without having any particular evidence for it— just a hunch) that skipping more releases is likely to increase the risk of there being "issues" during upgrade. - I have used only clean installs until the release of openSUSE 10.3, which I applied as an upgrade from 10.2. There are several salient facts surrounding this, however: -- It was not convenient for me (for irrelevant reasons) to do a clean install. -- The machine was not a critical resource. -- The machine was running nearly a stock installation of 10.2. -- I spent considerable time during the actual installation process using the installer to resolve package conflicts. -- I spent considerable time after the installation was complete performing further cleaning up of left-over packages from the 10.2 installation (see the thread "How To Route Out Leftover Pre-Upgrade Packages?" from [EMAIL PROTECTED]:50 (PDT == GMT - 0700)). - I encountered a problem with the installer in which it failed to install GRUB. I had to mangle it manually, and this is not something for amateurs. - It is immensely helpful to have a separate working system with Internet access so you can access on-line resources to help you with any difficulties that might arise. - When I asked about a 10.2 -> 10.3 upgrade that would have gone from 32-bit to 64-bit, I was told this would not work. I decided not to try, and stuck with 32-bit. Overall, I'm satisfied with the result of my 10.2 -> 10.3 upgrade, but I'd still prefer clean installations. Were it convenient or had the system been a more critical resource or had it diverged more from a stock installation, I would have been even more reluctant to have tried an upgrade. In short, unless you have fair expertise in Linux and SUSE internals and have good fallback computing resources, I'd stick to a clean installation. > ... > Aniruddha Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
