Pipe dreams: yum-based anaconda a step towards on-line yum-based upgrades?

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 15:26 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> So, I noticed while doing my first FC5t1 install the upgrades aren't
> currently supported in the reworked anaconda. Fair enough; there's a lot of
> changes under the hood. But that got me thinking: hey, maybe this is a great
> time to get it so that "yum upgrade" can actually easily bring one from one
> FC release to the next. (More realistically, maybe FC6 is a great time. But
> now might be a time to start thinking about it.)
> 
> I know there's historically been a lot of wacky special-casing in Anaconda,
> much of it legacy cruft, and much of it kinda important for, y'know,
> actually working upgrades.

Unfortunately, a lot of it depends on having the new kernel (or other
new part of the system) already running and so is hard or impossible to
do on a running system.   Think about things like the static dev -> udev
transition.

[snip]
> But overall, seemed like a pretty successful experiment. And, given the
> super-short lifespan of FC releases, something I'd really be interested in
> having as an option.

For some releases, it could work.  As a general case based on lots of
years of making upgrades work, not a chance in hell.  

Jeremy