Bill&Virginia Hodges writes:
> I have been running 1.3 ALPHA on an I386 w/cyrix chip
> for several weeks with very few problems.  Specifically,
> "file" command returns some message about "no magic number".

That is a rather odd error -- haven't seen it before.

> I need to determine if I should completely upgrade to 1.3
> or selectively upgrade things that do not work.
> 
> How reliable is the set of upgrade scripts?

The upgrade system in "sysinst" should be pretty reliable, modulo one
problem, which is that it tends to nuke the root crontab.

> Can I use them without shooting myself in my holely foot?

Probably, although you may be just as well off simply unpacking all
the sets by hand other than kern.tgz and etc.tgz

> What are the benefits of wholesale upgrade?

You'll have lots of bugs fixed, for one thing.

You'll probably want to get a full set of sources and rebuild your
kernel, btw.

Perry