Andrew Brown writes:
>i've done live, running migrations from 1.1 to 1.2 a few times, all
>with the machine being up, live, running, and doing stuff.  the only
>"down-time" the machine experienced was when it changed from the 1.1
>kernel to the 1.2 one.

>what i did (which may or may not be "correct", but worked fine for me):

This reminds me of something I've been meaning raise after every
binary install/upgrade I've done... (its been a while so the exact
paths may be incorrect :-).

In essence, in the (i386 at least) bootstrap install, /bin/cat is
_everything_ and there are dozens of symlinks to it in /bin and
/usr/bin to provide tar etc etc.

I have always found it necessary/easier to mv /bin/cat asside (to
/ibin/cat) and make _hard_ links to /ibin/tar etc. and stick /ibin at
the head of my path... since none of the install scripts use
/usr/bin/tar the directory it lives in does not matter.

Otherwise I found that the tar --unlink stuff (easiest way to get
everything intalled) clobbers the bootstrap stuff - you end up a bunch
of symlinks in the path called say tar,gzip which now point to the
real cat(1)! and have to start again.

Given that the boot strap stuff would normally be blown away after
install, why put it in the normal directories - where it is just in
the way - and trying to use /bin and /usr/bin  per normal paths means
hardlinks cannot be used which means .... I'm sure I've made my point.

I'll PR it if that helps.

--sjg
-- 
Simon J. Gerraty        <sjg@quick.com.au>

#include <disclaimer>   /* imagine something _very_ witty here */