Rhupgrade is a perl program that assists you in doing a hand upgrade of your
RedHat system.

Here's the LSM entry:

Begin3
Title:		rhupgrade
Version:	2.0
Entered-date:	04MAR98
Description:	The  purpose  of this Perl script is to help you in  doing a 
                hand upgrade from one version  of a Redhat distribution (4.x
                or above) to a newer one.
                It  requires   the  list   of  packages  available   in  the
                distribution you are planing to upgrade to, and it will use,
                if you have it, the list of packages that were available for
                the current distribution you are running.
                From there, it will tell you which packages have new version
                and release  numbers, which  packages are exactly  the same,
                and which packages are new (if  you provided the list of old
                packages). It  will take  into  account  the "contrib"  RPMs
                installed on your system, and warn you of any possible clash
                with packages in the release you  plan to upgrade to, and it
                will also  show all the  packages installed on  your system,
                sorted by  distribution. Last, but  not least, it  will show
                you  which packages  appeared in  the new  distribution, and
                which ones disappeared.
                Some of the reasons for  using this program include: wanting
                to upgrade  only some  packages, possibly  without rebooting
                your  system, having  a list  of what  you can  upgrade, and
                hand-picking the new  packages you want to  retrieve via ftp
                and upgrade, or just having an  idea of what was upgraded in
                the new release.
                This program can (and has been) used to upgrade to Hurricane
                (RedHat  5.0). It   contains  specific  help  to   make  the
                procedure a little easier.
Keywords:	RedHat, Upgrade, RPM
Author: 	marcsoft@magic.metawire.com (Marc Merlin)
Home-Page:	http://magic.metawire.com/~merlin/linux/
Primary-site:	ftp://magic.metawire.com/pub/linux/
		47.7kB rhupgrade-2.0-3.i386.rpm
		55.1kB rhupgrade-2.0-3.src.rpm
		52.7kB rhupgrade-2.0.tar.gz
Alternate-site: ftp.redhat.com /pub/contrib/i386/
		47.7kB rhupgrade-2.0-3.i386.rpm
Alternate-site:	sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/utils/package
		52.7kB rhupgrade-2.0.tar.gz
Copying-policy:	GPL
End


And here are a few reasons why you would want to use this program:

       o   The floppy upgrade may just not work for you (for me,
           the Hurricane upgrade on floppy died with a
           segmentation fault while it was parsing the packages
           that were installed on my system. I do not know
           whether the 4.1 and 4.2 upgrades would have worked
           because the last time I did one without this program
           was 3.03 to 4.0).

       o   Upgrading the RH way involves rebooting from floppy
           disks that are going to mount your partitions and do
           the magic upgrades there.  Even though RPM does a
           pretty good job at not doing anything stupid, on
           heavily customised systems you can have potential
           problems and/or surprises (on my machine /var/lib/rpm
           is a link to /usr/lib/rhs/rpm/ because this prevents
           me from running RPM before remounting /usr in r/w
           mode. Obviously the upgrade procedure will fail if you
           have an absolute link (you would have to changed the
           absolute link to a relative link a la link_relative in
           NFS).

       o   More generally, even if the upgrade is able to work on
           your system, you may have fiddled with your system a
           little too much to not quite trust the upgrade
           procedure to do the right thing anymore :-D

       o   Apart from the problems mentionned above, if you are
           doing an upgrade to a minor upgrade of the RH
           distribution (for example 4.0 to 4.1 or 4.2 (or later,
           5.0 to some other 5.x). 4.x to 5.x is not exactly a
           minor upgrade), you may think that the floppy disk
           reboot and upgrade procedure is overkill

       o   You may be using the e2compr patches
           http://www.netspace.net.au/~reiter/e2compr/ which
           renders your compressed ext2 partitions unreadable by
           standard RH boot/upgrade floppies

       o   You may also be annoyed by the fact that you need to
           reboot your running system just to upgrade a few
           packages. (Or you may not want to ruin your chances of
           winning the uptime war you have with your
           roomate/neighbor :-D)

       o   You may want to have your full system running, and
           have all your files easily available during the
           upgrade process so that you can look around, fix a few
           things on a fly, and upgrade packages at your own
           pace, using the opportunity to find out what RH
           changed, how, and why.
       o   You want to upgrade by hand, you know how to use RPM
           from the command line, and you're not afraid a fixing
           a few things by hand, need be, but you find it painful
           to make the list of the new available packages,
           compare it to what you have currently, and figure out
           what you want to upgrade.

       o   You may have a flaky/slow Internet connection, and
           doing an full ftp upgrade may be too long/too
           expensive/too difficult (wrt keeping the connection
           alive).  So, you decide to first ftp the packages you
           want to upgrade, but you need to create such a list
           (as obviously, you don't want to get package-x.y-z if
           you already have package-x.y-z installed on your disk
           (because the only difference between the two is the
           name of the release in the 'Distribution:' field
           announced by rpm -qip package.rpm)).

       o   You may just want to know which packages have changed
           (version number updates, or RH release updates), which
           packages are new, and decide what to ftp and upgrade
           when you get around to finding the time to take care
           of it.

Enjoy,
Marc
