Interesting, and probably worth a play with indeed, although I tend to steer clear of Bash (unhappy with) whenever possible to do the same in Perl (happy with). I imagine there is machine level stuff involved that would rule out a pure Perl version? However, my difficulties for OS replacement are not so much the OS setup itself but the 'production' stuff that needs to go on top and a raft of dependencies -- compilers, BerkeleyDB, myriad Perl modules etc etc etc. Since the system is 'live', I usually have to run 2 versions in parallel for a long time... so lots of rollbacks, synchronising overhead and so on. Usually newer versions of some things have to be replaced with older versions and then inter-dependency issues arise... some of the stuff I upgraded specifically for suddenly stops working. You are familiar with the general picture, I'm sure. But thanks for the thought. Sean > <div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">On Fri, > 17 Dec 2010, Sean wrote: > >> To: centos at centos.org >> From: Sean <soso at orcon.net.nz> >> Subject: [CentOS] two cents or not two cents >> >> Hello Producers >> >> "Longevity of Support" is an attractive drawcard for CentOS if it means >> the exact opposite of Fedora's "short support cycle" that does not >> provide updating of infrastructural libraries for very long, libraries >> which newer versions of applications (like Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera >> etc) depend on and which wont install unless the libraries are also >> newer versions? But is that what it means -- ie that those >> infrastructural libraries (libpango, libcairo etc) are continuously >> updateable to fairly recent versions? >> >> If so, the problem is in reconciling that meaning with the reputation of >> CentOS to only support older versions of applications (eg Firefox-1.5, >> Thunderbird-1.0 etc). It does reconcile, of course, if the implications >> are merely that the CentOS user must compile and install the later >> versions of such applications from source, rather than having the luxury >> of pre-packaged binaries. It doesn't reconcile if there is some other >> critical reason why newer such applications just wont install. But >> which? >> >> I ask here because the profusion of vague mission statements and >> 'target-enduser-profile' claims that litter the internet re '*nix >> distros' seldom actually address those real issues. And hopefully >> someone can enlighten. My complex production & developement desktop >> takes months to fully port to a new OS (or OS-version), so OS updates to >> get library updates (ala Fedora philosophy) becomes increasingly >> untenable. > > You might be interested in giving my ALI scripts a whirl on a spare > machine (even an old laptop) to start with, so you get used to how > they work. > > I wrote these especially to deal with doing a fresh linux installation. > > http://www.karsites.net/centos/anyuser/auto-linux-installer.php > > I can set up the services I want running in under 10 seconds. Beats > sitting there doing it manually for 3 days! > > The general idea is that you modify the installer scripts to work with > a particular system - just do it one time. Then you can replay the > scripts as often as you want, to re-install your system. > > Please let the list know if they help with your installation/update woes. > > BTW. Some applications such as Firefox need to be updated to their > latest versions, otherwise websites will not work with an older > version. I had these issues with running an old version of FF on > Fedora 8. I went from F8 to F12 using my ALI scripts without any > problems. > > Kind Regards, > > Keith Roberts >