A better process for upgrades - WAS:Re: [ale] X wants nvidia libraries

[James P. Kinney III]

It occurred to me that Mandriva being based on RedHat uses RPM's.

That provides an excellent mechanism for finding all of the config files
that have been changed since the initial installation.
rpm -Va will run a check on the every known, installed package and
report back a chart. 
(cut from the rpm man page)
The  format  of  the  output  is  a  string of 8 characters, a possible
       attribute marker:

       c %config configuration file.
       d %doc documentation file.
       g %ghost file (i.e. the file contents are not included in the package payload).
       l %license license file.
       r %readme readme file.

       from the package header, followed by the file  name.   Each  of  the  8
       characters  denotes  the  result of a comparison of attribute(s) of the
       file to the value of those attribute(s) recorded in  the  database.   A
       single "." (period) means the test passed, while a single "?" (question
       mark) indicates the test could not be performed (e.g. file  permissions
       prevent  reading).  Otherwise,  the (mnemonically emBoldened) character
       denotes failure of the corresponding --verify test:

       S file Size differs
       M Mode differs (includes permissions and file type)
       5 MD5 sum differs
       D Device major/minor number mismatch
       L readLink(2) path mismatch
       U User ownership differs
       G Group ownership differs
       T mTime differs

For example:
A small webserver was tested on the changes in the httpd package :
rpm -V httpd
S.5....T  c /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

This says the config file (c) is a different size than the original
installed one, the mode is the same, the MD5 sum is different and the
modify time is different.

This type of info can be readily scripted to deliver a list of config
files that need to be archived off-machine in order to perform a fresh
install instead of an upgrade install for rpm-based systems. Once the
new system is installed, a diff of the archive and new files and
thorough groking of the changes will make transitions easier.

I have found transitioning from one release to the next to be moderately
painless in the rpm world. However a release skip makes the next
transition very slow. Skip two releases and the back up and config
restoration time is less than the upgrade time (recently bumped an FC4
to F8 - GAG! Backed up user files and started over after the upgrade
process sat and pondered for 2 hours with the cpu at 100%. The backup
and reinstall and restore took 45 minutes.).
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7


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