update mechanism for new releases

[Matthew Woehlke]

Peter Robinson wrote:
>>> I've never attempted an RPM-based update from e.g. Fedora 10 to
>>> Fedora 11. How well does that work out for regular Fedora users?
>> Lot's of people will tell you that it works fine. However, this is not
>> a supported path for upgrade. Users should use Pre-Upgrade instead.
>> See:
>> => http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:PreUpgrade
>> => http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/PreUpgrade
> 
> Well its not supported completely, the simple fact that a lot of
> people use it means that its supported within certain constraints.

I think you confuse "supported" and "functional". Upgrade via yum is 
mostly /functional/. It is "(officially) supported" exactly to the 
extent that you get to keep the pieces. If you are lucky, people /might/ 
help you put them back together :-).

<aside>
Last weekend I finished yum upgrade 10 -> 11 on my Asus EEE... and it 
/did/ leave me with pieces. Specifically, I had to find a Live stick to 
boot to run fsck, since at one point I tried to boot to a partly-updated 
system with filesystem errors, and got into a situation where neither of 
"continue or give root password for maintenance" worked (any key press 
would just repeat the message, so I couldn't "give root password for 
maintenance").

Lesson here is probably 'don't reboot when upgrade is only partly 
complete' :-). Which I normally wouldn't do except ssd is so dang slow 
it took two days to do all updates. Also... *yum upgrade isn't 
supported* ;-).

That said, my first (on a VM) 10 -> 11 via yum went smoothly, and the 
other one did up until the IDE path on the (rather old) machine decided 
to pack it in. Finished updates, went to reboot, and got nothing but ATA 
errors. So... I bought a new machine, moved the drive, and it's now just 
fine. (I had to nuke xorg.conf, and, well, it shouldn't be that hard to 
fix NIC device assignment, but these were problems due to swapping out 
the entire machine from under the installation, not the upgrade :-).)

So... 60% "smooth sailing" rate isn't terrible, especially since I /was/ 
able to reassemble all the pieces I got to keep without too much trouble.
</aside>

> The problem with preupgrade is that it needs user interaction and a
> lot of space. It downloads the distro update locally, reboots the
> machine and then runs anaconda.

...which is why I couldn't use it on the Asus :-). (To my pleasant 
surprise, I somehow have /more/ free space now, but still only about 900 
MB.)

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
Do you know where your towel is?