How to preserve users in new install?

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

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It would appear that on Jun 1, Jonathan Rawle did say:

> Christopher Stone wrote:
> 
> > OT: but why do you want to do a fresh install instead of just upgrading?
> 
> That's the way I always move to a new Fedora release. If you "upgrade", new
> features don't get installed. (How often does someone ask, "why don't I get
> the graphical boot on my FC1 machine upgraded from RH9?")
> 
> Also, in the past some things didn't quite work properly after an upgrade,
> but that's probably less of an issue now that Fedora's a more stable and
> mature distro.
> 
> Finally, if you try out the test releases, upgrading isn't supported.
> 
> 
> The only trouble is, even doing a fresh install, if you keep your users'
> data they will retain their desktop settings, and that causes problems when
> KDE and Gnome are newer versions.

I'm less than expert here ;) but wouldn't it suffice to make archival
copies of /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, (maybe /etc/group) and /home, and
when you copy them to the newly installed system, just take care to
*NOT* copy any of the /home/*/.[a-zA-Z0-9]* files??? You would still
have the archival copy for reference when editing the new ones...
And for multiple user accounts where the users do some of their own
configuring, you could copy them, then rename them to .OLD${dotfile}
so that the users would still have access to them as a reference in
getting back half remembered configurations. 

Just an idea.

- -- 
|      ?           ?		
|			
|        -=-   -=-	 I'm NOT clueless...    	
|        <?>   <?>    	But I just don't know.  	
|            ^          Joe (theWordy) Philbrook           
|           ---  	     J(tWdy)P
|			  <jtwdyp at ttlc.net> 
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