Upgrade path to slink from pre-2.0 releases

[Bob Hilliard <hilliard@flinet.com>]

     An update path from pre-2.0 releases should be included in the
slink CD and all subsequent releases, at last for several years, in
order to fulfill Debian's promise of upgrading in place.  (Within the
past month I have had correspondence from someone upgrading from 1.1
to hamm.)

     From time to time packages are moved from one section to another,
and some of the packages installed by the current versions of
autoup.sh may be dropped, or have their names changed.  These changes
are sometimes made just before release, and have broken earlier
versions of the autoup script.

     I propose that the upgrade directory of future CDs contain the
packages required by autoup, and cd_autoup.sh be modified to use the
packages from this directory.  This would make the upgrade directory
about 9.3 Mb.  Since slink will require 3 CDs, this additional space
shouldn't cause problems.  After running cd_autoup.sh, a normal
invocation of dselect would complete the upgrade.  This script should
never need updating, and would ensure trouble free upgrades, at least
until the next major change like a.out/elf or libc5/libc6.

     Another approach, since apt-get is now stable, would be to
abandon the autoup script entirely.  The libc5 version of apt-get and
dpkg_1.4.0.8.deb (required when updating from a buzz system) and a
README file would be the only files needed in the upgrade directory.
As before, this would not need updating for future releases.

     Comments, please.

Bob


-- 
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  |_)  _  |_       Robert D. Hilliard    <hilliard@flinet.com>
  |_) (_) |_)      Palm City, FL  USA    PGP Key ID: A8E40EB9