Not having much experience with opensuse (yet), I recently realised that
there has to be a complete system upgrade once per year in Leap.
(Otherwise there might be problems with non-updated applications that might
not be accepted extern (e.g. browser)).
(Tumbleweed is even worse for a newbie: potential major updates all the time).
That’s why I would like to ask how to handle with installed applications
from opensuse repository and “extern” ones.
I read the descriptions about system upgrading, and they say one should
“pull off” (= disable, remove?) extern repos before upgrading.
(A) Correct?
(B) Do I have to uninstall all applications of these repos before system upgrade?
(Or is it done automatically when disabling/ removing the repo?)
Although I don’t have many extern repos/ applications installed (Pacman, Sauerland, …), it wouldn’t be nice having to do that.
(C) What happens with the installed applications from opensuse repos
that are included in actual Leap, but not in the new Leap?
… and BTW if you are currently on Leap 15.6 the next “major upgrade” will be to Leap 16.0 possibly in October, or even later (it might be better to keep 15.6 for a few months after the release of 16.0 to allow residual “kinks” to be straightened out).
Please be aware that 15.6 should be supported for 6 months after the release of the new version, so it will be perfectly usable unless you have specific needs for new versions of some application.
Yes, that’s one of the descriptions I read.
But the procedure of handling extern repos/ apps seems quite unpleasant and laboriously to me (newbie). You have to check for every application if it still exists in the former repos, or in any other repo for the new Leap… etc.
And what, if there is no repo/app for the upgrade Leap?
Kind of horror, if you need it.
And this uncertainty and tricky work every single year… makes me shudder
It is quite easy. If you have installed an application from an external repo which has the Leap (e.g 15.6) version hardcoded into the URL you only need to make sure, that you change the URL to the new release prior Leap upgrade.
If a package no longer exists in the new repo, zypper will ask you what to do.
For other installation URLs which don‘t hardcode a release number into the URL (e.g. the Google Chrome repo), you don‘t need to care about.
This is not even specific only for openSUSE but for all linux distributions with a fixed release cycle.
For Tumbleweed there are no problems at all. External repos don‘t contain any version numbers (as it doesn‘t exist), so (daily) upgrades are flawless.
As already written, you have some 6 months overlap between the old and the new major version during which external repos might catch up or you have enough time to decide what to do.
Packman or some well known home repos like Sauerland’s will likely be up and running by the official release date.
Some unusual home repos (maybe with a single person behind them) might have more problems, but those are not recommended anyway, unless you know what you are doing and prepared to bear the consequences.
FYI: When i upgraded from 15.5 to 15.6 from a USB stick, the upgrade function failed and it allowed me only to proceed with formatting the systems partitions - such had to include $HOME since the user management technique changed.
Therefore, i learned the hard way, that personal data does not belong onto any system partition and not even into $HOME but on further and maybe external partitions, which can be mounted aka linked after the upgrade / new install into $HOME.
