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The goal is to upgrade from Mageia6 to Mageia7. I have a backup of the /etc folder and all of its subcontents.
The upgrade had a lot of errors. Too many errors to report. I forgot most of them anyway. Now I have no trust in the rpm package database, or GLIBC, My current plan is to do a clean install of Mageia7, and keep my existing /home data clean. (I can use the /home folder names, and their owner/group ids to manually enter the existing ids for users),

How can I get a list of software I had installed on Mageia6 from the old /etc files?
I can merge the old and new /etc config files set up my configurations.

hankivy wrote:How can I get a list of software I had installed on Mageia6 from the old /etc files?

You can't, because that information is not contained below /etc. /etc is usually only meant for configuration files. Package database is below /var/lib/rpm.

Does your installation still boot, and can you run rpm -qa ?

Since you want a list of the software installed (which is not the same as the packages installed), you can open "Install and Remove Software" from the main menu and check each category for the installed software. Write down what you see and when reinstalling you can install them again. And if you use netinstall and choose a custom install where you can select packages individually, you can install everything right from the beginning.

You don't need to manually write that down, as this is the same as the installed packages, and can be easily queried via rpm -qa and also in a format that can be used to mass-install all those packages again later on.

I'm not going to say that you should upgrade rather than doing a clean install because I just upgraded and it was a truly horrible experience. I almost wish I had just done a clean install; with proper preparation, it might have gone easier.

If you decide to do a clean install, I would suggest that you start by copying your entire running system off to another location where you can easily access it. This is easy to do using the rsync command.

Then do your clean install. To restore your environment, you will not only need to reinstall all the packages you had, but you will need to migrate your old /etc directory back into place, and you will doubtless need a lot of the contents of /var as well (notably the contents of /var/lib...lots of databases are found there). By copying the entire running environment, you will have everything you need. After awhile, when you are sure you have your new install running fully, you can delete that copy.

A fresh installation from scratch, and afterwards selectively restoring your configs and documents back is always the cleanest way, as you say.
But usually most people don't want the cleanest but the quickest / most convenient way.
And then usually later on they spend hours figuring out tricky intermittent issues that could have been easily avoided ...

doktor5000 wrote:A fresh installation from scratch, and afterwards selectively restoring your configs and documents back is always the cleanest way, as you say.
But usually most people don't want the cleanest but the quickest / most convenient way.
And then usually later on they spend hours figuring out tricky intermittent issues that could have been easily avoided ...

There is always a decision to make. Will it be quicker/easier to do a clean install and then rebuild the environment? Or to upgrade and then deal with the resulting issues.

For me, almost always it has proven better to upgrade. The last clean install I did (in fact, the only clean install on this workstation in over 20 years, except for the initial install) was when I went from 32 bit to 64 bit. In that case, I had my desktop running with my environment in about 3 hours, but I did not have the entire system up and running for about a week.

In that time, there are two occasions when I have wondered whether or not a clean install might have been better; one upgrade of Mandrake back around 2003, and this most recent upgrade. Even at that, I have about 18 hours overall invested in this most recent upgrade (in three separate attempts), and that is still less than reconfiguring this whole system (even with the help of my existing /etc and /var) would have been.

I also did upgrade a friend's vanilla Mageia 6 system to Mageia 7 totally without incident.

So I guess my recommendation would be to try the update. If it works, great. If not, there is a decision to make: How complicated is your system? How long will it take to reconfigure after a clean install?

For me fastest new installation of Magei-7. Earlier with Mag-6, I copy / Home and configuration files for all programs that are important to me. 2-hours and Mageia-7 ready to work.

jiml8 wrote:For me, almost always it has proven better to upgrade.

Well, to be fair, your installation is a slight bit more complex then most people's installations