Source level upgrade from 4.9 to CURRENT..

[Andrew Reilly]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 05:38:16PM +0000, Rom Albuquerque wrote:
> to halt. So, 4.9 is installed and working, is there a source level
> backward compatibility issue between 7.x and anything older than 6.0 ?
> In other words, upgrading from the sources with such an old
> distribution is a doable task ?  

It's "doable", in that many of us have indeed upgraded through
those control points with source, but it can't necessarily be
done in one step.

Is it worth trying to do in multiple steps?  Maybe not: you'll
almost certainly want a larger root partition, and may very well
want to change to UFS2, both of which mean that you're going to
have to dump to backup, repartition, reformat and restore at
some stage (and that stage is one of the intermediate stops,
because you don't have UFS2 in 4.9).

So: you're going to need to be able to boot from the 7.2 (or
whatever) kernel+fixit combination to do the reformat anyway, so
why not go the whole hog and reinstall directly to 7.2 (or so)
at the same time?  That's what I did when I hit the UFS2
barrier, and I'm otherwise a died-in-the-wool source upgrader.
If you're having trouble getting 7.1 to boot from CD, then try
7.2 or otherwise sort out that problem, because not having a
bootable CD fallback position is not a comfortable place to be,
anyway.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew