Re: 3.1 upgrade or install?

["Joseph C. Bender" <benderjc@benderhome.net>]

At 08:32 AM 6/13/2002 -0700, Ben Goren wrote:
>This  is   my  preferred  method  of   upgrading  *any*  operating
>system. It never fails me.
>
	I agree with Mr Goren, and have a few more reasons to toss on the pile.

1.  It tends to remove any doubt about if an enountered problem is due to
an incomplete upgrade or not.

2.  It (hopefully!) encourages good file placement practices being done by
the admin(s), not to mention documentation of such.
 If it's a serious system, you should have your data directories separate
from the programs (which is why /etc/ is the way it is, 
and why an upgrade and a "make build" will not touch it).   And you know
*exactly* where everything is.  These are good 
habits to be getting into, really.

3.  Upgrades are also a good time to redo those disklabel slices you wanted
to reallocate, too.  This usually implies (in terms
of simplicity and speed) a reinstall of the OS.

I honestly don't think that on *any* Unix-variant I've ever adminned that
I've ever done an in place upgrade, honestly, 
except for experimentation purposes (and those were more trouble than they
were worth.)



Signing off, 

Joseph Bender
benderjc (at) benderhome.net
This account is used primarily for reading and responding to mailing list
traffic and is not my main mailing address.
My main mailing address is jcbender (at) benderhome.net
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