reviving Fedora Legacy

[Benny Amorsen]

Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> writes:

> Fedora 8's been out less a year. It has, in that timeframe, received *over
> 4600 updates*. Fedora 9 has received over 2600 in its current lifetime.
>
> How is upgrading to the next release really that many orders of magnitude
> more change than this?

The largest difference is that upgrading to the next release is almost
an all-or-nothing thing. Incremental upgrades during the release
generally affect just one package at a time, so testing is relatively
easy. When you upgrade the whole distribution you change openssl
version, and that basically means upgrading everything that could in
any way cause trouble, all at once. It is far from impossible, I do it
all the time, but it does need a lot more care.

Once OpenSSL gets banished this pain will subside a bit, but it will
probably never go away. Back in the "good" old days it was libc
causing that problem, but the developers of glibc have done an
excellent job of keeping compatibility for many years now.


/Benny