You're reading the manual upgrade guide, for remote systems where you would otherwise cannot boot the ramdisk kernel to upgrade, which handles all of that for you.
If you have console access to the machine, serial or glass. Things are far easier.
I would move them to a separate page and not delete them. Sometimes you need to know something about dealing with the ugly. Nice work and your blog is great.
In the past problems could happen if your kernel ended beyond cylinder 1024 on the disk (i386 problem)
You should have a disklabel with partitioning for at least /, /usr, /usr/lib, /var, and /home (with / fully behind cylinder 1024 for i386 Bios to be able to load the kernel via int13h )
Funny you say that. I can see your perspective but at the same time the beauty of Unix is that the OS is really just a bunch of files you can see and manipulate yourself. The system doesn’t have convoluted registry systems for instance to hold state.
So for me, deleting a few files is as good as or better than asking a package manager to do it. It proves to me that the OS is simple.
I think we have become so accustomed to complexity that now we often seek it because the simple way “couldn’t possibly be right?”
Wow this is gatekeeping if I have ever seen it before. A package manager that tracks all files installed by a distribution of software is an excellent tool, and in no way incompatible with the Unix philosophy.
You don't have to remove those files, the upgrade guide simply indicates they're no longer required.