Where Fedora Went Wrong (nice conclusion)

[Les Mikesell]

Anne Wilson wrote:

>>> Except that doing clean installs is a real pain.
>> That's a problem that could be solved.  Not easily, but at least it
>> makes an interesting problem...
>>
> Getting all the config files right again is what takes so much time after a 
> clean install. 

Of course - but if you know where you put the old ones it is the same 
problem whether you upgrade or install fresh.  Maybe the program saving 
the old copy would need to note whether the config was changed from the 
initial rpm install or not - I'm not sure how the decision is made 
during an upgrade about whether to overwrite your old version or put the 
new one is as a .rpmnew and make you deal with it.

 > In many cases it would be no problem to simply copy the
> config file from a recent backup.  I wonder if some of the pain could be 
> eased quite simply by pointing out in the Release Notes which packages need 
> important changes to the config files?  I'm thinking, for instance, of when 
> dovecot went from 0.99 to 1.0 - where the config section for authorisation 
> needed changes.
> 
> I'm only thinking of significant changes like that, so I wouldn't think there 
> would be too many.  The comfort that anything not listed there could probably 
> get away with the old config file could save considerable time and effort.

There's other stuff, like when the postgres database format changes and 
you have to dump and reload.  That would be considerably easier with 
extra space to work.   Then there's the stuff that fedora people don't 
like to talk about - that you have to get from other repositories. 
Those would work the same way as long as you could patch up the 
repository list and find matching package names, but it's unlikely that 
  anything shipped by fedora would include the list of matching 
repository names.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com