FC3 -> FC4 Upgrade? (was Re: reducing distribution CD count)

[David Woodhouse]

On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 09:31 -0500, Aaron Bennett wrote:
>Wha?? Upgrades from FC3 -> FC4 are not going to work?  I must have 
>missed something.  Can someone confirm that this is true, or better
>yet, not true?  If there's no upgrade path from FCX -> FCY, then the
>six month release cycle + Red Hat's EOL policy will orphan users on 
>un-upgradeable systems.

It depends on the packages you have installed. As it stands, some
packages which were in FC3 are missing from the rawhide tree -- so an
upgrade will not be able to update the complete package set. The will
leave outdated packages installed -- whether that causes problems or not
depends on the package and its dependencies. If it's built against
versions of shared libraries which are no longer present, then I believe
the installer will have removed the old version of those libraries and
will have left the package in question broken. That may be your MTA or
your X environment -- nothing important :)

As Seth says, you may be able to update the missing packages separately
to remedy this, if Extras has actually come together and has those
packages in a usable form by the time you upgrade.

By the time FC5 happens, however, Extras should be working properly and
the installer should handle it -- an upgrade should work properly as
before. That's why many people are requesting that we postpone the
package-killing spree until FC5 instead of doing it now.

The upgrade/EOL schedules basically give you the leeway to skip a Fedora
release and upgrade from N to N+2. If FC4 doesn't regain the missing
packages, I suspect I'll just be leaving most of my machines running FC3
until FC5 is released, and update them then. The ones which were FC2 and
waiting till FC4 will be updated to FC3 and then wait till FC5.

-- 
dwmw2