At 12:37 AM 6/27/00 -0700, Hal Murray wrote:
>Thanks for all the comments.

Here's another - when I'm upgrading a system, I don't use sysinst. I do it
by untarring everything into other locations, but on the same partition, eg
/usr/* goes into /usr/new/*, /* into /new/*, then I move everything in /usr
into /usr/old, everything in /usr/new to /usr, / into /old, and /new into /
(modulo keeping the existing /etc, most of /var, and some other things).
This has the advantages that 1) I can easily back everything out if it
doesn't work right, and 2) the system is in an "inconsistent" state for a
much shorter time. It *doesn't* guarantee that I won't have something
screwed up in /etc that will prevent it from rebooting without incident...

About the only oddity about this is that after you've moved /bin to
/old/bin, you have to use /old/bin/mv to get /new/bin into place.

I've found that this works very nicely. It's been awhile since I did a
*truly* upgrade, but i usually upgrade my home systems from an xterm
running on another machine, and never actually have to touch the physical
machine.

Note that you may have to run /usr/mdec/installboot to update the boot
blocks, too. I do this mostly out of habit, so I don't know if it's
required or not.