updating to 5.0.2

[steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn)]

I have been trying to upgrade one of my NetBSD boxes from 4.0 to
5.0.2.  I am suspicious that previous upgrades accomplished by simply
unpacking sets manually and not taking advantage of the things sysinst
does in a prescripted fashion may have meant that they have not been
achieved completely.

So I made a DVD-ROM, put it in the drive, it whirred for a good long
while, the light went on, the screen said Booting from CDROM: and then
it booted 4.0 from the hard drive in the ordinary way.   After much
wrestling with the BIOS, I decided to give up and try a different
tack.  So I followed wiki instructions and put everything on a USB
memory stick - how convenient.   Once I'd worked out how to persuade
the BIOS tho accept it as a disk, I pressed the big red button and
watched the LED on the stick flicker away, and hey presto! a 5.0.2
kernel booted, but them issued a prompt asking where to find init.
Even with boot -s it wants to know where init is.   I have no idea
whether it is safe to run a 5.0.2 kernel when everything else is 4.0

It's also very unclear to me whether I should be updating boot blocks
- indeed I don't know how to find out which previous versions of boot
blocks are compatible with which kernels.   I know none of this is
difficult in principle, but there are lots of untidy details that are
not taken care of in the documentation, and it's awkward trying to
keep up a mental model of the process when upgrades are a relatively
infrequent pastime.

Given that I have several NetBSD systems at different revision levels,
I would really like to know whether I need to get sysinst going to
automate things for me, and if so how to invoke it.   When I
have raised questions about upgrading in the past I have had
several useful replies, not all mutually consistent and no one
of them complete.   I have been so happy with NetBSD since my forced
migration from BSD/OS that I hesitate to raise this niggle, but it is
most frustating

-- 
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>