[CentOS] To upgrade or not

William L. Maltby CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com
Thu Jun 26 10:21:06 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 15:49 -0500, Lanny Marcus wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 3:32 PM, Michael A. Peters <mpeters at mac.com>
> wrote:
>         <snip>

> Well, as you gradually update packages, if you update everything, you
> will be on 5.2.  If you only update a few packages that you feel are
> necessary for security, you will continue to be on 5.1.   

Ummm... not quite. Addressing several posts I saw in this thread.

First. There is no *unique* 5.1, 5.2, ... As posted on this list many
times, and probably in FAQs, these nomenclatures only represent a time
and content based snapshot of some upgrades to the system. Associated
with this snapshot is a manifest. If you add any updates 5.1, you may
have a 5.1 with some 5.2 stuff in it. The result is not a 5.2 because
the manifest is incomplete.

It's not a 5.1 because 5.1, by definition, does not contain the packages
updates you have applied. That being said ...

Yes you'll be on 5.1 because you have not achieved 5.2!  ;-)

Regardless. You will find the manual labor of selectively applying the
updates to be not worthwhile after a while. And at some point you may
not be able to apply some that you need/desire because prerequisites
that are needed are not installed.

Further, regardless of 5.1 or 5.2, as soon as any update is applied, you
are no longer on that release because the manifest is on your system no
longer matches 5.x. But as "hoomons", we conveniently ignore this
distinction and commonly use phrase such as "fully updated 5.x".

It is a useful concept for communication shorthand, but that's all it
is.

Anyway, overall doing selective security-only updates is a bad idea IMO.

To the inquisitor: no I also am not an official CentOS person. So what?

To concerns about FF: there is an officially released 3.0. I used the
b5, the one released by upstream with 5.2. It has its problems. Get the
real 3.0 release, put it in your home dir, update your desktop icons to
point at it, and get the benefits. Even the release candidate 2 I'm
running ATM is much better than the beta.

Plugins: mine finds it and others. Check out the various instructions
related to installation (they're copious). Key: .mozilla/pluginreg.dat
and .mozilla/firefox/pluginreg.dat. Not to be edited manually normally.

If you have the "local install" 3.0 in your home dir, interesting places
are here ~/firefox/plugins. Also, for system-wide install, interesting
things are in /usr/lib/mozilla and /usr/lib/firefox.

However, the most interesting place are the various installation and
setup instructions.

> 
> If you can backup the data on your laptop, give it a shot. Do not
> upgrade anything, without backing up. HTH
<snip sig stuff>

HTH
-- 
Bill (only one cup of coffee so far - I hope it doesn't show too much)




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