Hi Federico, Federico Giannici wrote on Sat, May 27, 2006 at 01:14:52PM +0200: > We upgraded an i386 PC from 3.4 to 3.9. We followed the instructions in > every "Upgrade guide" from 3.4->3.5 upto 3.8->3.9, but installed only > the 3.9 disk sets.
When you intend to go from one release to the next, upgrading tends to be simpler and less error-prone than reinstalling. But when upgrades were neglected (or, under special circumstances, not necessary) for several years, it is almost always easier, quicker and cleaner to back up the data and to reinstall from scratch than to try a multi-step upgrade. A multi-step upgrade is a long and tedious process. When you have little experience, you will probably get something wrong at some point or other. If you have lots of experience, you will probably find better use for your time. In case anything does break, you will have a hard time finding anybody remembering off the top of their head which particular quirks the update process used to have several years ago. Well, of course there are people who know, but most of them will prefer debugging current problems over revisiting old ones. > Everything seems to work correctly, but we have the following error > when we try to execute a pkg_add: > > Unknown option: preserve > at /usr/libdata/perl5/OpenBSD/PackingElement.pm line 572, > <$fh> line 6. > > Is there something we can do to solve the problem? Chances are something went astray either with one of the upgrades of your Perl interpreter, or (most probably?) with on of the upgrades of the pkg_* tools, or with your /var/db/pkg package database. Maybe it's possible to sort that out in detail, but probably that amounts to an exercise in futility. Even in case you find out where this particular problem comes from, chances are something else went wrong, too, which might cause more harm later. Do you really trust yourself everything you did during the upgrade was sufficiently correct? How do you plan to evalute the potential impact of any errors that might have slipped? If the machine you are talking about is in any way important and if you want to be reasonably sure it will work reliably, you are probably best off backing up your data and reinstalling from scratch. This advice holds even now, even though you have already spent lots of time on the upgrade... :-( Yours, Ingo P.S. I would be rather surprised if your problem were related to any bug in the pkg_* tools. -- Ingo Schwarze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
