Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
I did a clean install for several reasons. Primarily, I did it do get rid of all the cruft which had accumulated from many years of installing and uninstalling packages. I have either moved the hard drive from one machine to another, or copied the installation from one disk to another and then moved the new disk, since, IIRC, Bo. I have used dist-upgrades all along the way and it has, indeed, worked flawlessly. But, there is a limit to what deborphan can do in keeping a system clean. It can reliably find libraries that are no longer needed, but non-library packages installed as dependencies is another problem. That is why I did a clean install that I could run side-by-side with my old Sarge install for a few months.On Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 07:36:17PM -0800, Marc Shapiro wrote:Back when I was running Sarge I had apache v1.3 and php5 working just fine. I did a clean install when I switched to Etch, instead of using 'dist-upgrade.' When I did the install I installed apache2, instead of apache v1.3.First, why did you clean install? The dist-upgrade process works extremely well except in a very small number of corner cases.
Now, on the Etch install, I switched from using apt-get to using aptitude right from the start. Since aptitude keeps track of packages installed only as dependencies it should prevent the future accumulation of such cruft.
From what I have heard on this list, it may have been a good thing to do the clean install at this time for other reason, as well. Several people have reported problems with this particular upgrade. These problems have mainly been due to the switch from XFree86 to Xorg and the switch to using udev. By doing a clean install, I didn't have to worry about these conversions, as the clean install through chroot and debootstrap simply created an install with the new systems already in place.
As I stated in an earlier followup to my original post, the solution to my problem was simply clearing the cache in Firefox. Apparently, there was still a copy of the unprocessed file, from before I got php to actually work, still in the cache. That was preventing firefox from properly handling it. It thought that it already had the file, but it did not know what to do with it. Once the cache was purged, firefox got a new copy of the file and it was perfectly happy to display this one, since it was properly preprocessed by apache and php.
-- Marc Shapiro mshapiro_42@yahoo.com