Upgrading from F16 to F17 fails

[JD]

On 09/08/2012 11:46 AM, Andy Blanchard wrote:
> On 8 September 2012 18:38, Heinz Diehl <htd at fritha.org 
> <mailto:htd at fritha.org>> wrote:
>
>
>     Upgrading F16 to F17 from DVD is one f*cking mess. Seriously.
>     Backup your data and do a fresh install. It will save you a lot of
>     time and hairpull.
>
>
> Better yet, when you do the re-install set up some disk partitions so 
> you can segregate the binaries from the data.  A separate /usr/ is a 
> bit problematic at the moment, but it's worthwhile creating dedicated 
> partitions for /home/ and /var/ - especially if you have website data, 
> etc. in the case of the latter.
>
> Once you've done that, you can nuke all the other partitions and 
> re-install from scratch every time with the only pain being that you 
> need to restore your configs.  Unless there are major version changes 
> between release, that's usually just a case of restoring your old 
> config file and restarting the daemon, although occasionally you are 
> better starting over from scratch.
>
> Backing up everything before the re-install is still advisable though.
>
> -- 
> Andy
>
> /The only person to have all his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe/
>
>
Currently, on my system, the only external drive partitions used to contain
parts of fedora are /var and /usr/src . /var partition is a mount point,
but /usr/src is a symlink within /usr (on root) pointing to the src dir 
in some
external partition.

I wonder about /etc, because that's where so much conf is kept.
But it is small enough to simply back it up to an external partition.
The pain is in remembering all the apps for which conf files were
modified. To address that, inserting a comment like
# this is a modified conf file

into the conf file helps one to search for all conf files that were
customized, and bring them back.
Problem arises when new config vars are introduced in the newer
release of the app, in which case one must integrate those as well.

It just seems there is no automagical way to do upgrades :)