Back Again

[Les Mikesell]

Claude Jones wrote:
>>
>> Care for a really stupid example? Take a 2006 automobile.
>> Examine it very closely. Then with a garage full of new 2007
>> parts make it a 2007 automobile. All the time making sure that
>> everything fits and still works.
>>
>> Email us when you're finished.
> 
> Having just done this to two production machines (using that term 
> loosely), this discussion interests me. I was pleased with both 
> updates. Both were fairly modern machines but both are used for 
> lots of experimenting, and have many packages from non-Fedora 
> repositories. Both have nVidia video cards running the 
> proprietary drivers. Both upgrades were in the neighborhood of 
> 3-4 hours. Both came back up with broken video - not too hard to 
> fix, but expected. Repo files had to be either reinstalled or 
> manually fixed to get the F7 entries -- not hard. I've found a 
> few broken packages, but, not deal breakers. I have lots of 
> audio/video packages on these boxes including stuff from CCRMA 
> and BLAG as well as Freshrpms. rpm worked OK under pretty 
> serious stress testing for me. 
> 
> Is there something better out there than rpm? I constantly hear 
> complaints about Yast, but have little direct experience with it 
> having gotten tired of SUSE fairly quickly every time I tried 
> it. The .deb package manager seems OK, but I don't remember 
> being particularly wowed, the several times I've used it. 

The new kid on the block is conary as used by rPath which claims to have 
some big advantages (rollbacks, binary diffs, sandboxes etc.)
http://www.linux.com/articles/60500
I don't have any experience with it, but conceptually you want to do 
exactly the same things as a version control system so it makes sense to 
use something that provides those functions.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com