In the past I have downloaded the new ISO image, reinstalled the
systems and restored configuration files from backup. However, now
with an entire fleet of servers, this is too cumbersome.

Is it supported to upgrade directly from e.g. 3.12 to 3.16 or only
to the version immediately following like in OpenBSD?

Is the ".apk-new" files listed  by "update-conf --list" after
upgrading, the only extra files left in the system compared to a
reinstallation of system and packages or do the upgrade process also
leave files in other places that could be delete? I don't like old
cruft to linger around.


Best regards,
Mogens Jensen

After testing the upgrade procedure multiple times, I found no
problems with upgrading directly from 3.12 to 3.16:

# sed -i 's/.12/.16/g' /etc/apk/repositories
# apk update -v
# apk add -v --upgrade apk-tools
# apk upgrade -v --available
# update-conf

Reboot system and you are done. Probably 5 minutes of work, with
'update-conf' taking the most time.

A funny thing i noticed while upgrading:

"After this operation, 414 MiB of disk space will be freed."

In a world where everything is only getting more bloated with every
release, this is just amazing and one reason why Alpine is the best
Linux distribution available. Thanks.

I will test the procedure again when 3.20 is released :)

Best regards,
Mogens Jensen