[CentOS-devel] help needed : Distro migration guides / scripts

[Karanbir Singh]

Hello everyone,

Firstly, have a great new year everyone! I am sure its going to be an 
exciting 2007!

Secondly, I am looking for some help with creating migration guides and 
( if needed ) scripts to help people move from Oracle's Linux to CentOS. 
There have been a few requests for this, and we know that people who 
installed Oracle's linux are updating their machines against the CentOS 
repo's : and we'd like to give them an option of doing the right thing.

Its important that we make sure they dont leave behind broken installed 
tree's ( Oracle does some odd things to the package Release tag's and in 
some cases these people updating against CentOS will get left with 
dangling packages, it would be nice if that didnt happen ).

So, would anyone like to take up this task ? I will help in whatever way 
possible, David Parsley has also offered to help along anyone with his 
experience in doing the TaoLinux to CentOS migration process.

What we need is essentially this :

1) A way to get the right config's setup ( and the centos-release 
package installed )

2) Check the updates and package management system - get yum installed 
and ensure up2date is pointing at the right place

3) Check for packages that need updating - and inform the user about them.

4) check for orphans ( packages that have no update path in the new 
CentOS repo's ) and report them to the user - there is a script in 
yum-utils that already does this.

5) Check and report on packages which have a EVR > than whats in CentOS 
and report on what they are ( and maybe some changelog info that the 
user can see and decide what he wants to do with the? or is that even 
required ? )

6) Finally, do whatever is required to either move the machine to CentOS 
or leave it alone.

I suppose the order in which things are done can easily be changed

- KB

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq