Re: yum upgrade v anaconda upgrade differences

[Jeremy Katz <katzj redhat com>]

On Sunday, May 17 2009, Seth Vidal said:
> On Sun, 17 May 2009, David Timms wrote:
>> On the yum list a question was asked which intrigued me:
>> Why can anaconda manage to upgrade a system, when yum upgrade can't.
>>
>> The postulation was that anaconda is cheating (ie running --nodeps 
>> installs). This would allow it to complete an upgrade where 
>> dependencies lead to unavailable packages that are not on the dvd, but 
>> are in the complete Fedora, and or non- fedora repositories, that are 
>> not available at upgrade time.
>>
>> Is that why it can work ?
>> Or what are essential differences between an anaconda upgrade and yum 
>> upgrade ?
>
> anaconda is also running outside of the system you're trying to update -  
> it doesn't have to worry about making its own environment entirely  
> unusable. So it can do things like --nodeps w/o a concern for not being  
> able to complete the transaction.

It also means that we can do things like use a newer version of rpm or a
new kernel with ext4 support to (eventually) allow for migrating from
ext3->ext4

Jeremy