upgrades and local mods (was .l vs .1)

[Rick Perry]

In article <2606 at phri.UUCP> roy at phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>... When we upgraded
>from 4.2 to 4.3, we had a hell of a time tracking down *all* the local
>stuff and made a decision that as much as possible we were going to put all
>the local stuff in separate directories from now on.

   This discussion started with ideas on where to put and how to name
local man pages, but I've seen a few comments about how much trouble it
is to find local and locally modified stuff when doing an upgrade.  The
only Unix system I am familiar with is Pyramid, and it may interest
some to know what they provide when doing upgrades...

   Pyramid provides some programs called 'rls' and 'rlscmp' plus a list
of files (including stuff similiar to 'ls -lg' plus a checksum) as they
should be if you haven't modified anything in the old release.  With these
programs you can easily generate lists of what files have been added and
what files have been changed from the standard distribution, then you
can easily save all those files before wiping everything out and loading
the new release.

   If this is not a standard Unix thing provided with new releases it
should be!  It does give you some degree of confidence as all of the old
root and /usr is wiped out as the new ones are loaded to know that you've
saved anything that was changed or added locally.

   Still, it did take me a whole day (that's a 24 hour day) to get things
back to normal after the last upgrade, the biggest problem being files
that we modified slightly (like /etc/termcap) and wanted to have both
the local mods plus the new upgrade version mods in the current system.

...Rick			..{cbmvax,pyrnj,bpa}!vu-vlsi!perry
			perry at vuvaxcom.bitnet