After two years running SuSE 10.0, I’ve gritted my teeth and done a clean install of OpenSuSE 10.3 on my laptop. As usual, the first two days were spent fixing broken pieces, downloading and installing packages not in the minimal install, locating the packages I use that are not part of OpenSuSE (Maildrop and Dspam), updating configuration files to the new syntax, etc. Plus finding source for the packages that used to be part of SuSE but aren’t anymore (QVWM, a Windows 95/98 like window manager I use for my wife’s account).
This is always a painful process. That’s why I’ve put it off until just before support for 10.0 ceases in November. When I had several computers, I did beta testing of new SuSE releases on this laptop, so clean installs made a lot of sense. But now that it is my only computer and I’m not doing the beta testing, maybe doing updates to each incremental release is a better idea. There are some big jumps in configuration file syntax (e.g., Blackbox window manager) and APIs (e.g, Dspam and suspend to disk) that I needed to figure how to accommodate.
Procmail’s configuration file syntax is opaque to say the least, but nearly every Linux distribution includes it. Inclusion of Maildrop in spite of it’s clearer configuration file syntax is not a given. Which takes less time over the long haul, learning Procmail’s syntax (or looking it up every time I need to add some filtering rules) or finding, downloading, building and installing Maildrop every time I do a clean install? One thing that make Maildrop easier is that the source tarball is now RPM compatible, so installation is as simple as “rpmbuild -ta maildrop-X.Y.Z.tar.bz2“. Sweet!