[linux-elitists] Mailman Must Die

[James Sparenberg]

On Friday 26 October 2007 23:43:06 Modus Operandi wrote:
> In the immortal words of James Sparenberg <james@linuxrebel.org>:
> > On Friday 26 October 2007 08:31:56 Teh Entar-Nick wrote:
> > > Matthew Galgoci:
> > > > > Really?  You can configure it not to completely bomb out your
> > > > > dist-upgrades?
> > > >
> > > > Really!
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > > Red Hat, Inc
> > >
> > > Somehow I doubt you ever do dist-upgrades.  You probably reinstall your
> > > boxes from scratch every time you need a newer copy of firefox.
> >
> > Gentoo! (sorry couldn't resist.)
>
>   Ah, Gentoo does have its advantages. Basically, you can upgrade every
>   package on the system (the equivalent of a dist-upgrade) every day if
>   you feel like it without worrying about it. The caveat is, you can't
>   be a moron about setting it up. I also like the fact that you can
>   emerge multiple packages at once, unlike apt-get which enforces a lock
>   on dpkg so you can't spawn multiple concurrent instances.
>
>   And,'tis true, RPM-based distros are notoriously brittle when
>   upgrading. (I am still using RHEL 4 for a production box somewhere,
>   even though I would benefit greatly from features of RHEL 5, because
>   I don't want to risk the upgrade until I can set it up on a new box!)
>
>   Does anybody have success stories about version jumps using RPM-based
>   distributions?

Actually yes.  RPM + URPMI on Mandriva/Mandrake.  I've in the past been able 
to upgrade and then reboot a Mandriva box into the new "version" without 
problems   My longest string was a 9.2 to 10.2 run without a re-install 
broken only by replacement of the box due to PSU emitting strange blue smoke.  

I've done YUM upgrades with CentOS from 4.0 up to 4.5 without a problem.  
(including kernel changes) and without losing data/non-CentoOS environments. 

James