On 7 Mar, Mike MacCana wrote: > Its possible, people have done it before. > But personally I'd rather just do an upgrade, and I don't see what there > is to `fix'. An hour or two scheduled maintenance once a year isn't a > big deal for me. Remember, Red Hat aim to keep binary compatibility > within major version numbers, so 7.x - 7.(x+1) is, in my brain, > equivalent to a service pack in the windows world. And, or course, what > you're upgrading to is stable with much testing, fixing and (these days) > three beta releases before its declared so.
rpm doesn't merge your changes to config files, though, or help you do it interactively. The only way I know to do it is to note down each ..rpmnew file, and carefully run sdiffs or edit the old and new manually. Doing it for a whole system is a daunting task. Admittedly, the fundamental problem isn't with rpm, it's that config files aren't designed to make that task easy, nor does (any?) package include its own config file updater, which is the only other approach. By this I mean, sendmail could provide its own script that would update a version N config file into N+1 (mostly a matter of sed scripts), and then go on to ask you if you want to use each of the new features, or what to do about old features deleted. That kind of thing. At work, when we release new versions of products, we either maintain backward compatibility, or provide update tools for the old data files. luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
