Upgrade 3.3 to 3.4

[Garry Ricketson]

Is it possible to upgrade Minix 3.3 to 3.4 without re-installing the entire system ?
If it is, what is the procedure ?

Thanks

[David van Moolenbroek]

Hello,

On Saturday, August 26, 2017 at 4:37:31 PM UTC+2, Garry Ricketson wrote:

Is it possible to upgrade Minix 3.3 to 3.4 without re-installing the entire system ?

Unfortunately, a number of fairly invasive changes between 3.3 and 3.4 have made such an upgrade very difficult. It is possible in theory, but requires an unknown set of necessary intermediate checkouts and recompilations. Reinstallation is therefore pretty much always the better alternative right now. We are trying to be more careful about this going forward, but obviously that does not help you in this situation.

To be sure: the installation procedure allows the /home partition to be preserved by selecting the (R)einstall option rather than the (F)ull installation. In many cases, moving any files you would like to preserve into /home is the easiest way to keep them across reinstallations.

Regards,

David

[Garry Ricketson]

Ok,   Thanks for the reply
 It is because I noticed ImageMagick is available in the 3.4 packages, but not in the packages for 3.3,...
Guess I should have just gone ahead and used the 3.4 snapshot instead.

[Martin Vahi]

If I remember correctly, one of the sales arguments of the MINIX3 is that
MINIX3 can swap its whole kernel out with a new one  WHILE RUNNING.

The irony is that there's that "small" nasty thing called "collection of files",
site specific configuration data within the various config files, the binaries
of the ports collection, etc.

I find the hot-swappable kernel actually to be a very impressive, something
to be learned from and may be adopted elsewhere, but unfortunately
here comes the userland again.... :-D

[Garry Ricketson]

Oops, another mistake, so I deleted,
 Ok well, thanks , I guess that is why he said " It is possible in theory, ", 

[David van Moolenbroek]

Hello,

On Sunday, August 27, 2017 at 2:18:12 PM UTC+2, Garry Ricketson wrote:

 Ok well, thanks , I guess that is why he said " It is possible in theory, ", 

Not quite. The problem with upgrading from 3.3 is related to making sure the operating system and userland do not get too far out of sync during the upgrade, which requires upgrading through intermediate commits, and that is possible only in theory because we do not know exactly which commits those are. That entire problem is largely orthogonal to the subject of live update, which aims (only) to eliminate the reboots that are currently necessary to go along with such upgrades, thereby allowing critical applications to keep running. Those are therefore different problems that have different (known) solutions. Martin Vahi is once again showing that he has no problem voicing his view on things he does not quite understand.

Regards,
David

[Garry Ricketson]

Ok, thanks again,
 I am thinking, for one this is a very new install, for one  thing, so not really a big deal to re-install, except that I don't have live access to the machine/server,
only ssh, I kind of don't want to ask them to re-install, and really it seems fine using 3.3.
It does not seem practical to upgrade the entire system ,  for just 1 package, "ImageMagick", and it is not essential, but another idea would be to get the "ImageMagic" source, and compile it for Minix 3.3, maybe ?
and install it that way ?
   thanks 

[David van Moolenbroek]

Hello,

On Sunday, August 27, 2017 at 4:56:17 PM UTC+2, Garry Ricketson wrote:

 I am thinking, for one this is a very new install, for one  thing, so not really a big deal to re-install, except that I don't have live access to the machine/server,
only ssh, I kind of don't want to ask them to re-install, and really it seems fine using 3.3.
It does not seem practical to upgrade the entire system ,  for just 1 package, "ImageMagick", and it is not essential, but another idea would be to get the "ImageMagic" source, and compile it for Minix 3.3, maybe ?
and install it that way ?

Hm yeah, that does sound like a tricky situation. I don't know what caused ImageMagick to not be available as a package on 3.3, and that makes it hard to say anything meaningful about it, because there are many possible causes - ranging from trivial to resolve, to infeasible. The first question would be whether it was a problem with ImageMagick itself, or with one of the packages it depends on. It is however likely that it failed due to X11 not being available. If you want to try compiling ImageMagick yourself, there are basically two approaches you can try: compiling the ImageMagick source in pkgsrc, using the pkgsrc environment and dependencies [1], and compiling the original ImageMagick source code itself [2]. The former approach will (ultimately) show you where exactly the problem is in the dependency tree, but if X11 is indeed what is missing, then making the pkgsrc version work without X11 is probably not going to be easy. The latter approach may help with the problem of "unnecessary" dependencies in pkgsrc, because you may then for example be able to disable X11 support with a configure flag. But then you may have to deal with other missing dependencies yourself as well, to the extent that you cannot use pkgsrc to obtain those. I'm afraid I cannot tell you up front which approach is better, or whether either approach will succeed at all, let alone what you would need to do exactly to make it work - you'll just have to try..

Regards,

David

[1] http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=developersguide:pkgsrcguide

[2] http://www.imagemagick.org/script/install-source.php

[Garry Ricketson]

I keep accidentally clicking the "post" button instead of the reply, and it submits a empty post, so have to delete it, since I don't find any edit options,..
with that said, back to the topic,
 Thank you very much for taking the  time, and posting the links.
I came up with a easy simple solution, no need to upgrade, or re-install, nor install ImageMagick,  Image Magick can work without the X11, or Xorg, I use it on a couple of other servers,
but the display command, and anything requiring  display don't work, for obvious reasons.
 Really though, all I use it for is for the 'convert" and 'resize' commands, so any way I looked at some other packages that are available, and found this
little "gem",  "resize_image-0.6nb5.tgz", installed it, and it does everything I need.
  I suppose if I had just been more clear to start with, and simply stated what task I needed to do, and instead of thinking I needed to upgrade, someone might have
all ready known about this "resize_image" package.
 It does not accept .png images, but that is not important,... 
Thanks