Upgrade path question

[Adam Jackson]

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 13:51 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Adam Jackson (ajackson at redhat.com) said: 
> > The received wisdom seems to be "Only care about upgrades with stride <=
> > 2", meaning, FC5 to F7 should work, but FC1 to F7 is madness.  Is this
> > written down anywhere, or just tribal knowledge?
> > 
> > I ask because there's a fair bit of cruft in the X packages to handle
> > things like Obsoletes: XFree86.  We haven't shipped that since FC2, so
> > it's hard to still care.
> > 
> > I also don't know how closely this is tied to RHEL construction.  So
> > far, RHELs have been issued every other Fedora, so that might be the
> > source of the "stride 2" idea.  Maybe that won't be true in the future?
> 
> Technically, it's not quite true now. RHEL 3 =~ RHL9/FC1, RHEL 4 =~ FC 3,
> RHEL 5 =~ FC 6.
> 
> Historically, we've supported upgrades from N-2 on the premise that that's
> what's reasonable to test and make sure works; moreover, with the slightly
> extended lifecycle, someone can be on a maintained FC5 installation when
> F7 is released. Anything other than that is gravy. There hasn't been specific
> policy about garbage collecting obsoletes, to the the best of my knowledge.
> 
> Strawman would be if we're supporting N-2, to garbage collect after N-4?

That sounds reasonable to me.  Stride 4 would mean two years to learn a
new name and/or upgrade, which seems plausible.

Just to be sure we're interpreting this the same way:  X was provided by
xorg-x11 in FC-4, but modular packages in FC-5.  My interpretation of
N-4 would be that the Prov/Obs for xorg-x11 could then be removed in the
rawhide cycle between F-8 and F-9.

- ajax