Upgrade vs Install: request for recommendations (trick questions, sort of)

Geoffrey Leach geoff at hughes.net
Fri Jun 29 22:09:59 UTC 2012


On 06/29/2012 01:41:42 PM, Max Pyziur wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm going through the recent release cycles of both Fedora and CentOS
> in
> upgrading machines.
> 
> I've had to do a fresh install on a machine where the available /boot
> partition size of 200MB was not adequate. Consequently, I created a
> /boot
> partition of 1GB and did a fresh install. (This was for moving from
> F15->F16; I then successfully upgraded to F17.)
> 
> The issue for me was matching the installation to what I had
> previously.
> My approach was to store a list of rpms (rpm -qa > F15RpmList.txt) 
> and
> then sdiff -s to a list of F16 Rpms.
> 
> Is there a more efficient procedure than this?

I have a couple of Perl scripts to automate the listing and re-loading 
of rpms. they essentially automate what you're doing.

If its not too late, here's a suggestion. Put / and boot in their own 
partitions, then put /home, /usr/local, and so on in their own 
partitions. Then, when you're faced with a new release, you can leave 
these partitions untouched, and merely install the new release. There 
are any number of administrative details with the new release, but at 
least their are details over which you have control, as opposed to 
those resulting from an upgrade that didn't quite work :-).


More information about the users mailing list