reviving Fedora Legacy

Patrice Dumas pertusus at free.fr
Wed Oct 15 07:52:02 UTC 2008


On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 08:31:12AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> 
> Once you start upgrading packages all over the place to a much newer
> version than was in the original release, you might as well just
> upgrade.
> 
> Seriously, I don't know why people are so scared of just _upgrading_, if
> new packages are acceptable.

One example in my mind is the change from pam_console to consolekit.
Sure this is an improvement. But xdm and wdm didn't worked after that.
This is typically a big change that happens between releases that a user
may want to avoid. The thing that don't work in later versions may even
get fixed over time. There are a lot of similar regressions between
fedora releases. Other examples are programs that worked with KDE 3 and
don't work with KDE 4.

> I upgrade remote, headless machines with yum, and reboot them into the
> new distribution. Quite frequently. And I laugh at the people who say it
> doesn't work. It's a fairly fundamental part of my server management
> technique -- yes, I run Fedora on my servers.
> 
> Perhaps a better approach to this whole thing would be to educate people
> a little better that upgrades _do_ work, and they're generally fairly
> seamless. And to fix the occasional cases where they're not.

Sometime it is easily fixable, sometime it is complicated, it depends a
lot whether upstream takes care about compatibility or not (as is the
case, for example in the dbus/hal/*Kit case). And in any case it takes 
some time. Also in general the maintainers in fedora are 
looking forward and don't care about breaking compatibility, and if they 
cared this would slow down innovation.

--
Pat




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