WARNING:DO NOT UPGRADE TO CORE 4

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 12:34, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> >> Consider the possibility that an installation might not work on machine
> >> X, but an upgrade might.
> > 
> > Then you've created a totally unique situation where the reason it works
> > at all is likely because you have bits and pieces of some unrelated
> > version still running.  That might work for you, but if you have
> > problems no one else will understand them or be able to help.
> 
> How can one have "bits and pieces of some unrelated version still running"
> if you do a clean install?

You don't with a new install.  If you upgrade as you suggest, you
probably do.

> I'm not actually asking for your help,
> I'm simply pointing out that your dogmatic assertion
> that installation is always better than upgrade 
> is not true, giving as a counter-example
> the fact that I have a machine where the first did not work,
> and the second did.

I'm not being dogmatic about it being better, I'm being dogmatic
about no one else being able to help with additional problems
on an upgraded machine because no one will know which bits are
left over from the previous version.

> The reason for this - although this is not strictly relevant -
> is that recent versions of Fedora run mkinitrd when installing their kernel.
> This has to determine in some way which modules should be included in initrd
> and in my case it includes the wrong scsi driver.
> There are various ways in which I can counter-act this,
> but the simple fact is that a clean install does not work -
> it leaves a machine which will not boot.

Some bugs aren't found until someone tries the combination of things
that the program gets wrong.  Reporting your lspci output and the
module that is wrongly installed is probably the best you can do
along with using whatever means you can to work around the bug.

> >> Also consider the possibility that it might make more sense
> >> to keep /home on a separate partition, and leave this alone even if
> >> installing.
> > 
> > That's a reasonable approach, as is backing it up and restoring. You
> > probably want the backup anyway in case you make a mistake involving
> > the partitions.
> 
> It's not an either-or situation.
> You implied that you deleted /home ,
> and I'm pointing out that that was a silly thing to do.

It's not silly - it's a matter of choice.  If there is anything
important there you should be prepared to restore it from backups
in any case.  Doing it that way gives you a change to resize,
use a different filesystem, use LVM or whatever new features your
new version offers.  Not formatting the partition saves a few
minutes. Pick which you want.

> > Historically, Linux kernels have solved most of their hardware issues
> > somewhere around X.X.20.  If don't use anything unusual you might not
> > notice this.  I see that firewire might be fixed in 2.6.12...
> 
> This seems to me complete nonsense.
> There are many hardware issues for Linux remaining,
> eg problems with RAID, graphics, 11g WiFi, many USB devices, etc, etc,
> I suspect there always will be such problems,
> as new hardware devices come out.

There will always be problems with new hardware.  I'm talking about
problems introduced with new software.  At about version 20 it has
most of the bugs found and fixed.  But if the 20 releases that included
those bugs hadn't been released, they still would not be found or fixed.
Overgeneralization, of course, but that's what experience suggests...

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com