[techtalk] upgrading to Netscape 4.7

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 09:24:09PM -0400 or thereabouts, JoAnn Elliott wrote:
> Thanks for the tips. I successfully uninstalled the netscape 4.6 rpm with

Wa-hey :)

> it, but "just this girl" said to use that and it worked. All I had to do was
> redirect the icon to the new location of the netscape executable. I feel
> like a million bucks after this!

I bet. Congrats :) 
 
> now, can I remove the install folder/files safely?

This is probably more something to remember for the future, and if
you have the space to keep lots of stuff knocking about on your
machine, but...

One reason for keeping all the old files around when you install
something, especially something that will take time to pull down off
a modem again, is if you think that there might be an update in 
the near future. Often in the unix world (dunno about elsewhere,
sorry if I'm explaining something you know!), when a new version 
of a program is released, there are two versions: the complete set
of files again (huge), or a "patchfile". Patches are files which
contain comparisons of particular bits of the old and new versions,
but don't contain stuff that didn't change. Hence they're much
smaller.

You then use the 'patch' command (she says blithely, skipping over
'how' cos she gets it wrong too often :)), which takes the old files,
looks at the differences the patch contains, and updates the relevant
bits accordingly. 

This is particularly useful for really big programs that take an
age to download: you can get it once, then just keep applying
patches, which are smaller, rather than getting the whole lot again.

(Of course, if your program works fine, there is no need to upgrade
it when a newer version comes out anyway :) I'm still using old stuff 
on one machine because my husband only ever applies security fixes on 
it and not the other updates, because we don't need those and it's 
more important that those particular programs work than that they're 
the latest version..)

Telsa

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