The short answer is no.
Although the directions previously posted provides a means of
preserving settings, the fact is that Linux as an open source system
(YDL is one distribution among many) has so many different contributors
that arriving at a common approach to nearly anything is akin to
getting the United Nations to agree on one point. An agreed upon
process to "preserve settings" from one version to another (across all
distributions of Linux), may happen eventually, however it is not being
discussed at the moment -- as far as I know.
A little history is needed to understand yum's value.
Before yum, one had to be very focussed and organized in researching
and understanding how a program which one was interested in was exactly
comprised. Let's suppose I was interested in xmms or xine which are
programs which play movies and music CDs. If I was fortunate there
would be a version which someone else compiled on their PowerPC which
would allow me to download it and run it -- as is. If I was less
fortunate, or attempting to download it before the designers had
completed a new version then I would have to probably build the program
for myself -- from C language, raw code, from scratch on my own
machine. Now a little difficulty begins, because some programs need
others, which themselves need others (and so on) -- these smaller
programs are called in general, dependencies because the main program
is dependent upon these smaller programs to work. Dependencies for a
program can be as essential as traffic lights, police or fire
department for a city. Dependencies themselves of course do different
things and themselves often have different authors, who are not related
and have no association to the designers or design team of the main
program -- other than the fact that without that dependency the main
program won't run with the features one wants or finds valuable.
The challenge to all this gets a little clearer when you realize that
each dependency also has to be compiled into an executeable and bundled
with the main program. Also some dependencies need to be processed and
recognized by the main program in a certain precise sequence. Consider
that some programs don't use the same dependencies and others have no
dependencies while others don't appear to have any until in running or
compiling the program you discover that a process cannot continue
without a dependency.
Now we are ready to consider what yum does. One of the components of
yum is yum.conf which is a file which yum refers to as a database where
specific locations of programs are listed which yum can refer to and
research upon command. Within yum.conf one can list as many mirrors as
one wishes. The advantage to doing so is that sometimes a program or
dependency is in one location or and not in another. Yum can search
these locations as fast as the processing and broadband speed allow. I
have found it to be very heady stuff that yum can search 5 or more
mirrors spread across the planet check for all dependencies for each
program and install it flawlessly in the correct order and sequence
time after time. And yum can check for updates of dependencies and or
the main program and make the changes it is supposed to upon install.
yum will install programs and dependencies according to the version of
the install it has the instructions for. Usually each version of YDL
has a version of yum specifically looking for that version or a range
of updates functional between releases of major versions of YDL.
Best wishes...
On Jun 11, 2006, at 11:23 PM, Ted Goranson wrote:
Derick Centeno wrote on 6/11/06:
Hi Ted:
Take a look at this page. Hope it helps...
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/support/solutions/ydl_4.1/kde-
migration.shtml
Thanks Derick. I saw that of course. What I'm looking for is a more
fundamental newb1e question. I have 4.0 installed. I have 4.1 on
disks. Is there a way to upgrade without losing settings.
I really don't understand yum, but it seems that what you can update
to is related to the servers you point to.
So is it true that with a default yum file, I can only update to 4.0x?
--
__________
Ted Goranson
Sirius-Beta
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