> On Wed Feb 09 2000 at 23:47, George Karabin wrote:
>
> > > Can a CHANGES file be provided with this and every release (and
> > > pre-releases) of a new distribution. In fact, two CHANGES files...
>
> Nice to see a reply so quickly. I hope this issue gets a fair bit of
> debate (as this thread died in a pathetic whimper in the lead-up to
> rh61, and IIRC, rh60 before that).
>
> > RPM provides a hook that might give you some of what you want. 'rpm
> > --changelog -p <RPM list> will dump the changes associated with a list of
> > packages. You can use 'diff' to compare the changes from an old release
> > to a new release to see what's changed.
>
> That's an idea, but I doubt that this approach will work.
>
> > I see two gotchas to this approach, depending on the information you are
> > looking for:
> >
> > 1) The list of changes in each RPM isn't always reflected in its change
> > log. Still, you can learn a lot by browsing the change logs.
> > 2) The information that comes out of this is pretty disorganized. It
> > definitely isn't filtered into things that are important, and things that
> > are just details.
>
> What I am looking for is documentation about both the OVERALL changes
> to the distribution, and what I might need to use/cope with them.
> Your approach will only pick out things in specific rpms like
> "upgraded to new release" and so on. It won't hit on config changes
> and other such vital things.
>
> The need for technical information for system administrators is
> becoming vital. RedHat is now being VERY seriously used in many
> corporate situations, and some of the changes in the new distros can
> cause much unnecessary grief for unweary sysadmins. I live is a
> moderately sized country town, and I'm seeing all sorts of people
> starting to reject m$crud for doing network services... the need to
> document these sorts of changes in some detail is going to grow as
> linux (and redhat distributions) becomes more widespread.
>
> Personally, I'm pleading for this to save my own sanity :) But I'm
> sure that such documentation will help many others, become a one of
> the more popular nice little features of upgrading to a new version of
> redhat...
Back in the days when I was an IBM mainframe person, IBM called it a
"release guide." It was a significant document, outlining new features,
possible gotchas and migration issues.
It was also the first document I read; from it one should be able to
decide whether the new release is wanted (improved install procedures
would not persuade me, but support for important new hardware probably
would), and who wee needed to tell about it; one release of OS/VS1 to
another generally meant operations only; MVS to MVS/XA meant pretty much
everyone in DP as some training (for programmers) was required.
Note: MVS to MVS/XA meant we went from 24-bit addresses to 31-bit;
required new compilers to use new features; new fixes to almost
everything, For that there was a separate migration guide.
--
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.
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