upgrade questions 4.10 -> 5-stable

[Bruce A. Mah]

If memory serves me right, Dariusz Kulinski wrote:

> It's nice guide, but I personally think there few important thing stat
> are missing (and I was trying to found answer, but without luck):
> - what directories, should be especially backed up and restored after
>   upgrade, I know /etc /usr/local/etc, /var/mail /var/cron /var/db
>   what else?

As a rule of thumb, back up everything.

For the case of a reinstalling from installation media, what to
restore depends on how you've configured your system.  It's beyond the
scope of the document to try to enumerate all possible directories
that might be holding data you care about.  At a bare minimum, things
I usually care about on my systems can be found in /boot, /etc,
/usr/local/etc, /var, and whereever home directories live.  Beyond
that, it depends too much on how your own system is set up.  That's
why you want to make sure you've saved *everything* to backup media,
so if you miss restoring something you can always go back and get it
later.

For the case of a source upgrade, you still want to back up
everything, but since most of what's overwritten is your base system,
you won't be restoring anything explicitly unless you mess something
up.

> - how to upgrade config files while while doing source upgrade, is it
>   possible to use mergemaster, what are recommended steps?
>   Overwrite all the new files and run mergemaster or there is better
>   way?

Step 16 of the source upgrade procedure says specifically to use
"mergemaster -i".

> - some other stuff that I just forgot

Sorry, can't help you with that part.

> Basically I would like make the migration flawlessly, and in shortest
> time possible.

In my experience, sometimes those two goals are at odds with each
other.

You didn't say anything about the machine(s) you're trying to upgrade,
but if any of them happen to be providing mission-critical services, I
highly recommend running through the upgrade process on a scratch
machine first.  Or even better, build up a new system and gradually
migrate data and services over to it.

Bruce.
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