How could installed unsupported packages influence
the process of migration from SLED 11 SP1 to SLED 11 SP2?
If so, are there tricks to mitigate those?
Thanks.
[QUOTE=LLiner;2799]How could installed unsupported packages influence
the process of migration from SLED 11 SP1 to SLED 11 SP2?
[/QUOTE]
That’s question which doesn’t have a definitive answer. The answer could be anything from ‘no effect at all’ to ‘completely break your system’. It would depend what the packages are and even then the answer may not be obvious.
Attached is a list of all the packages which are in the SP2 Core repository. (I suspect this info might be online somewhere but I didn’t find it in a few minutes of looking so just dumped the output of ls of my repo to a file.) Due to the new repo model that’s been adopted for SP2 (see http://www.novell.com/support/viewContent.do?externalId=7010225), it’s also a list of all the packages which have changed between SP1 and SP2.
If you have an unsupported package installed and want to know what dependencies it has you can use
$zypper info --requires packagename
Then you can look at the attached list see if the packages that provide it’s dependencies have changed between SP1 and SP2. Unless there’s been a change in the major version number of a package it depends on, don’t worry about it.
If you want to find out which packages depend upon a particular package trying to remove it will result in zypper listing them
$ zypper rm packagenameBe sure to answer no! I’ve always had the feeling there ought to be a better way of finding that info but have never managed to find one.
I’ve been going through all the packages that don’t come with SLED which I have on the machines I manage and trying to install them on SP2. So far they’ve all installed and worked fine.
If you want to play it really safe, uninstall them, re-install them after the update.
Thank you, Mike for your substantial answer!
It would be great to have a note of all those, but if not, is there is a way now to figure them out?
[QUOTE=mikewillis;2801]I’ve been going through all the packages that don’t come with SLED which I have on the machines I manage and trying to install them on SP2. So far they’ve all installed and worked fine.
[/QUOTE] If this rule is applicable: My unsupported packages = All packages installed - All packages included on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1 for x86 (http://www.suse.com/LinuxPackages/packageRouter.jsp?product=desktop&version=11&service_pack=sp1&architecture=i386&package_name=index_all)?
Do all multimedia packages also require re-installation again?
Thanks.
All the packages supplied as part of SLED have the same vendor. So you can find out what packages you have installed which aren’t part of SLED by producing a list of all the rpms and filtering out the ones without that vendor string. The vendor string for SLED packages is ‘SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany’, so to get a list of the package name and their vendor you could use
$ rpm -qa --queryformat '%{name}:%{vendor}\
' |grep -v gpg-pubkey| grep -v 'SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany'
Filter out gpg-pubkey as well because they’re not actually packages, they’re just keys they’re signed with so you don’t need to worry about them.
Well if you uninstalled them and want to use them again, then yes. I’m not sure if I understand the question or if I do, why you’d single out multimedia packages.
Thank you Mike for quite a substantial answer!
Here I missed the word “proprietory”, the packages which Suse users have to install themselves additionaly.
I recall how a painstaking job was this procedure while learning the first Linux system. So it would be best to preserve them installed.
The issue is perfectly solved.
If they don’t conflict with other installed or suggested for installation packages, they won’t be touched and will do their job. But if there is a conflict they will be removed and you’ll need to find and install the appropriate versions of them.
May be this is the most realistic way, because I’ve tried to assess one of the options suggested here by mikewillis to go through “a list of all the packages which have changed between SP1 and SP2”, and understand its unreality- my package base contains, in addition to SLED-Novell 2040 packages, 490 other and vendor-changed ones. And what surprisingly: mostly openSUSE BuildService and Packman! Earlier I was convinced their direct reference to SLED11 SP1 implied SLED support. So checking them with 826 packages with changed dependencies might take all the 6 month overlaping period alloted for the two packages migration.
[QUOTE=LLiner;2799]How could installed unsupported packages influence
the process of migration from SLED 11 SP1 to SLED 11 SP2?
If so, are there tricks to mitigate those?
Thanks.[/QUOTE]
Usually they shouldn’t influence the process, only if they conflict with SP2 they will be removed during upgrade.