Should I expect to be able to source upgrade stable/7 -> stable/8?

[David Wolfskill]

I'm in the process of setting up some "reference" machines at work;
about the only "interesting" thing about them is that each is
configured to be able to boot from any of the 4 MBR slices; I have
a script for "cloning" one slice to another, at which point I can
boot from the newly-populated slice and do a source upgrade -- and
I can run tests (e.g., software builds) under each environment with
fairly good confidence that -- save for external factors that aren't
under my control -- I can compare results when booted from one slice
vs. results when booted from a different slice.

After getting the 7.x machine set up, I effectively cloned it to
be the starting-point for the 8.x machine.  I then booted from a
recent
stable/7, updated sources to stable/8, then:

* cd /usr/src
* make buildworld
* make kernel	# I'm using GENERIC for 8.x; I had used MAC for 7.x
* reboot to single user

Well, I tried to.  I got some fairly ugly errors trying to mount root --
and the KVM system at work, combined with no PS/2 keyboard ports on
these machines conspired to render the machine completely non-responsive
at this point.  (And the only facility for capturing the screen content
was as a JPEG image; I'm not willing to sned a JPEG image to -hackers@,
and I'm not quite desperate enough to transcribe it by hand.  If the
following experiment fails similarly, I'll put the image up on my Web
server somewhere.)

I'm in the process of repeating the experiment, starting with upgrading
from stable-7 r205655 to stable/7 r207388 first.

If I should update sources to an earlier point for 8.x, I'd appreciate a
"heads up" sooner, vs. later.  :-}

[I note that /usr/src/UPDATING labeled "stable/8/UPDATING 206382
2010-04-07 19:04:36Z ume" doesn't literally address the above; rather,
it claims to have instructions (at the end) "To upgrade in-place from
5.x-stable to current" -- it might be a Nice Touch to update that before
8.1-RELEASE, I suspect.]

Thanks!

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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