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