[nmglug] partial update update

Wed Apr 4 09:47:53 PDT 2012

I love Cairo-Dock.  Do you find it to be a memory hog?  I haven't had
much luck tracking down why, but it is for me!  Right now top is
reporting its memory usage as:
Virt: 922m  Res: 186m  Shr: 15m
A bit rediculous, if you ask me, but no one involved with the project
was particularly responsive to my inquiries.  I run a few applets, but
i haven't taken the time to systematically test each one.  Same
problem i have with Firefox...too many extensions i rely on constantly
and haven't spent the time to lose functionality long enough to
comprehensively test them.

> My main gripe is that my current Gnome Desktop is really tweaked
> with a lot of third party action that I will loose with an upgrade.
> It may be unavoidable at some point and I'll have to swallow hard
> and do it probably.

I know that problem!  My solution follows, in short:

Partition the drive so /home is mounted on a separate partition than /
(I also symlink /opt to /home/opt )

`mkdir /home/user.back && cp -R /home/user/\.*` before an upgrade, but
keep my home directory intact.  This recursively copies all dotfiles
into a backup directory.  If i have to clobber a dotfile or several in
my home, i already have the backup to reconfigure from.  If everything
goes smoothly for a couple weeks, I can tar the directory and archive
it.  I used to do it this way for my home and for /etc, but i have
started doing something else because i wanted more incremental
versioning of /etc...

I now run etckeeper (packaged in Ubuntu repos) so that scheduled
version control commits and commits before and after apt-get installs
and removes are recorded in git.  I believe etckeeper also supports
yum/rpm based systems, maybe others, and git is my favorite VCS but it
works with others, as well.  This has been wonderful.  I now have a
/etc/.git directory containing the current state and history of all
files in /etc, and i can back up that directory and restore it on
fresh installs.  This makes it easy to run a diff against any config
files for any program, and restore them (sometimes with edits,
sometimes just as they were).  I like this system so much that i'm
adapting it for my home directory, too.

You can also use dpkg (on Debian based systems) to dump to a file a
list of installed packages.  You could feed this back into apt-get to
install everything on the list, but doing this wholesale is not
recommended for several reasons, such as packages you installed last
time but don't use or, especially, differences in the new release that
have conflicts with packages used last time or are just unused now.
Hand trimming the list before feeding it into apt-get will save you
time.  Even without doing this, the beauty of central repositories and
package management is that it only takes a few minutes to install
something when you come around to needing it again, though.  Even
several things at once :)

> thanks for chiming in!

Thanks, it's good to be here!

Cheers,

Sean
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