So I Tried to upgrade an old (10.0) Mandrake server to 10.2) and it worked for a bit. And then some part of it failed. I did the 10.0 to 10.1, then 10.1 to 10.2 shuffle, but somewhere in the second stage urpmi got trashed and now I can't urpmi (or, in fact, rpm, there are dependencies to URPM.pm and URPM.pm can't be found).
I can recover pretty easily but it's a pain. Of course, I wasn't totally upgrading everything though. That was probably the bug. The last time I tried a complete update using that technique it worked fine. For now I'd say that it's probably possible to totally upgrade a Mandrake 9.x->10.0 and upwards using the multi-stage technique mentioned in the link, but selective updates (particularly selective updates from two generations ago) are a bad idea.
What I did was:
upgrade rpm and urpmi from the versions in 10.0 to 10.1, then upgrade them again to 10.2, but without upgrading everything else. Well, it seems that some packages (e.g., perl-URPM) need to be upgraded but the dependency trees might not be complete, or, at any rate, something goes wrong in the process and some things got lost (URPM.pm, from perl-URPM). they were removed but then installing the new copies didn't work, so now urpmi and even rpm don't work anymore.
Heh, that's the last time I'm doing that :-). Partly, because I don't have any more old servers to maintain, but also because (while it's possible, and not so difficult, to fix it), it's a pain and not worth the time. Just backup, reinstall everything, and restore, is what I say. I couldn't follow that advice with this latest server (won't boot from any newer media, something wrogn in the bios or similar), but I'll do that with everything else.
Of course, at work we're using SuSE and I'm getting ready to upgrade in place with that. Hay, never learn :-).
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