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To: Network Coordinator <nc@ai.net>
Subject: Re: Announcing 2.0.5-950622-SNAP 
Cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.ORG>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-reply-to: Your message of Sat, 24 Jun 1995 13:24:47 EDT
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 1995 00:21:32 -0600
From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.ORG
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: Rather like the way make works for a source tree in general. Anyway, 
: count me in for work on the update part of the project. 

I have a bunch of ideas floating around in my head that I need to find
a free minute or 10 and jot down on paper/disk.

It should be possible to grab the entire distribution, put it on a
large floppy and do an upgrade.

However, there are a lot of things that get in the way of doing this
just now.

Some are easy:  New binaries and Libraries.  You copy the new ones in,
reboot, and you are set.  Ditto the kernel, kinda.  The format of the
kernel config file sometimes changes, and you need to be able to
translate old config files to the new ones.  This is usually easy.

Then you get into the thornier issues:  /etc/rc* and /etc/netstart.
>From time to time, things need to be added to these file, and you want
to preserve, as much as possible, the configuration that has been
made here.

To sum up some very rough ideas:
	1) You need to replace some binaries
	2) You need to patch some files
	3) You need to convert other files

This doesn't address the "dual boot" issue.  In that case, you'd want
to be able to say "Install the system onto that other device, and use
my current system as a template."  It also doesn't address the "ooop,
that was stupid, I want to go back now." either.

Warner