[repo-coord] RH9 -> FC2 dist upgrade

[Jeff Pitman]

Hi:

This is just an informational email about an interesting upgrade I did 
over the weekend on my laptop.  I present it here mainly as a 
discussion point or reference for historical purposes. (IOW, 
workarounds are known).  I wasn't brave enough to jump all the way to 
FC3, so I decided FC2 would be a good jump point.  BTW, my system was 
using a bunch of repos: Jpackage, atrpms, dag, freshrpms, fedoralegacy, 
kde-redhat and pyvault.

I did this:

1. Point sources.list to FC2 repos.

2. Upgrade Apt.  (Should've upgraded rpm too, but I forgot.  Weird 
things happened, but it worked...)

3. Copy boot.iso contents to /boot/grub/upgrade.

4. Use the following grub:
title Upgrade To Fedora Core 2
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /grub/upgrade/vmlinuz ro
        initrd /grub/upgrade/initrd.img
(i think root= would boot into Linux after Anaconda completed, but I 
didn't do that and it just kernel panic'd at the end of the upgrade.)

5. Boot single, then init 3.

6. apt-get -f install.  Fix some inconsistencies.  Surprisingly few.  
Saw two ntps installed.

7. Upgraded rpm to fc2 build.  Lots of hangs with __db and friends.  
Core dumping going on deep in the belly of rpm.  Should have done this 
upgrade prior to Anaconda!

8. apt-get dist-upgrade

ATrpms, CCRMA, Dag, KDE-redhat, NewRPMS, PyVault all had packages that 
were left over from the upgrade. So, for analysis I checked the 
policies to see why:

# rpm -qa |grep rh9 > noupgrade
# for p in `cat noupgrade`; do expr $p : '\(.*\)-[^-]*-[^-]*'; done | 
xargs apt-cache policy > policies

There are 2 strategies that would go along way to cover for dist 
upgrades on 3rd party repos:

1. Remove packages no longer provided by repos. Those that only are 
found in the RPM Database.

2. "Downgrade" to next best version provided in a repo.

Of course, you don't blanket this policy across the entire RPM database 
or things are going to bust.  This is where APT or Yum's consciousness 
of a Distribution would really shine.  I'm attaching the policies text 
file if you want to take a look at what was left over from this 
upgrade.  A lot of these packages left over are also backports of 
packages required to support dependencies.

Anyway, at the end of it all, Sun's J2RE, Oracle 10g, vmware, crossover 
all worked without reinstall. X.org worked after deleting reference to 
"psaux" for mouse.  And my Data Was Still Intact! I was pleased.  (Last 
bug to work around: Chinese and IIimf)  Look forward to FC3 soon after 
the dust settles.

take care,
-- 
-jeff
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