Re: [owl-users] Owl updates and new ISOs

Hi Radek,

Thank you for your feedback.

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 08:39:52AM +0200, Rados?aw Michalski wrote:
> That's good that recently new ISOs are published more often.

Indeed, and we intend to also publish these for the stable branch after
our next release.

> The reason why
> it's important from my point of view is that not all of my colleague are
> familiar with Owl rebuild/reinstallation process (they don't get the point
> simply).

FWIW, updating an Owl system to the latest packages (from the same
branch) amounts to running "make installworld" over the installed
system.  There's no need to "rebuild" anything.

"rpm -Fvh *.rpm" (with the new *.rpm packages) also works and is much
quicker, but then you may need to restart some services manually
(e.g., if pam* packages are updated, then services such as sshd may
sometimes need to be restarted).

If the system was already in use and had some local customizations, then
*.rpmnew files and the like may be created for any "conflicting" changes
to configuration files.  Messages to this extent will be printed during
the update process, and the changes will need to be merged manually.

The same process works for upgrading to a new release of Owl (e.g., for
upgrading Owl 1.1-release or 1.1-stable to Owl 2.0-release), as long as
you don't try to "jump over" a release (e.g., upgrading Owl 1.1 to 2.1
directly won't be supported - you need to upgrade to 2.0 first).
We have "trigger" scripts and the like in place to resolve known
would-be-issues transparently to the sysadmin doing the upgrade.

> That's why when they download ISO image sometimes they don't do
> nothing to have the system upgraded to the latest possible level. More
> frequent updates of Owl ISO will make the gap smaller.

That's true.

I'd dare to say that the concepts behind Owl make keeping the base
system's userland up-to-date significantly less critical than it is for
other Linux distros, though.  The Linux kernel and third-party software
(not part of Owl) are the major exceptions here.

Alexander

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