Choosing an approach to Fedora upgrades.

[CB]

On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 08:54 -0500, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> CB wrote:
> > What approaches do people here use for upgrading Fedora installations?
> > I'm assuming that one wants to upgrade, even if only for curiosity.
> 
> You don't mention the procedure that I use.  I have two RAID devices
> that I use for root filesystems (including /home).  At any given time,
> one of them is the production system, and the other one is usually the
> previous version of Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core.  When the time comes to
> "upgrade", I do a fresh install on the "non-production" device, which
> becomes the new production system.  Then I selectively copy files and
> directories from the previous system to the new one.  Since the old
> system stays around for a long time, there's next to no chance that I'll
> forget to migrate anything.
> 
> This is more labor intensive, but it has the advantage that it avoids
> the build up of "cruft" that can occur when one constantly upgrades.
> 

That's quite a neat idea. It wouldn't really work for my situation
though as I just have too many disparate applications installed, and
can't quite bear the thought of having to install them all again over a
fresh Fedora install. 'Cruft' or major distribution changes will no
doubt make it necessary eventually, but I don't want to do it for every
upgrade.