Update Fedora Core 3

[scorpio2002]

Hi everybody there! :-) Once Fedora Core 4 Final is released, I'm wondering if it'll be possible to update a Fedora 3 system or if it will be necessary to format and install Fedora 4 ex novo...

[AndyGreen]

The rpms that make up Fedora act differently depending on whether they are updating or being installed. Little niggling problems with scripts in the rpms that execute only in the more difficult update case can and do get missed, or during the mass update scripts can tread on what other scripts are doing and so on. RH do test individiual packages for their update action when releasing a package AS an update, but they don't do so for all packages in the distro. Whoever is responsible for a particular package surely is updating each time, but on a dirty system. For example, if the update script worked a few versions back but got broken, they can't tell because they got updated from their FC3 version already.

Having said this, I did FC1 -> FC2 on a machine as a yum update okay. But my point is that for stable versions of a distro, doing an install (which will NOT nuke your partitions, /home and so on unless you tell it to) is a more certain way than doing an update. So you might as well do the install over your FC3 filesystem.

[JasonXJ]

Would this then nuke all of your .conf files as well?
httpd.conf
yum.conf
fstab
smb.conf
etc which I have spent so much time on.

my question would be from FC4t1 to FC4t2

[AndyGreen]

No, RPM is careful about your config. If it sees you edited the configuration file, but it wants to give you a new default configuration, it leaves yours intact and saves its new one as blah.conf.rpmnew. You can then have a look through after install and bring over any important changes they might have made to yours. But yours is boss as far as RPM is concerned.