On Sat, 15 Sep 2001, B. James Phillippe wrote:

> I have recently installed NetBSD 1.5 on a DEC Alpha system, and I'd like to
> upgrade to 1.5.2.  Do I need to go through 1.5.1 first?  Also, does the
> upgrade path contain/install only things that have changed, or is an
> upgrade basically done from the same full and complete medium as a clean
> install?

The upgrade overwrites the binaries and share files in the base system
and removes any obsolete ones. The main difference between an upgrade
and a clean install is that the uprade won't mess with your partitions.

> BTW, I have made almost no customizations yet (I'm a total newbie and just
> trying to figure things out before I color outside the lines).

Any files that weren't installed by 1.5 remain. "sysinstall" does
create a new "/etc", but only after it's moved your old "/etc" to
"/etc.old". You can simply run "diff -r" over the two directories to
see what's changed, or what you need to reproduce in the new "/etc".
It should be fairly painless, as there's very little change in "/etc"
between 1.5 and 1.5.2.

It does overwrite "/root/.cshrc" and "/root/.profile", so back those
up if you care about them. Ditto if you've customized files under
"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/{xdm,app-defaults}" directly (which you'll see, is
not a good idea).

Frederick