FC4->FC5 upgrade options

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2006-03-11 at 00:42 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> 
> > One fact is never
> > going to change though...a 'clean' install is going to be entirely more
> > predictable than an upgraded installation.
> 
> How can you be so dogmatic?
> The fact is, a "clean install" is going to fail completely on some machines,
> so unless you call that "predictable" 
> I don't see how your statement can be true.
> 
> I've had 3 complete installs of RedHat and Fedora that have failed,
> perhaps out of 50.
> One was a SCSI-only machine,
> and the other two were Sony Picturebooks.
> 
> I've had one upgrade that completely failed -
> that was FC-2 to FC-3 on a Sony Picturebook.
> However, the machine still worked (sort of).
> I managed to upgrade in the end using yum.
----
FC-4 installer disks had some issues to be sure.

I have only had 2 installations that failed ever though and both seemed
for good cause.

1 - CentOS-4 (RHEL-4 clone) because Dell/Red Hat/LSI decided to remove
support for Megaraid 2 cards. Had to build a kernel module and it's
running fine, even today.

2 - RHEL 7.1 - didn't support the motherboard SCSI (required a patch
disk)

Now I know that FC-4 had trouble installing on some hardware and we know
that just about everything was updated from original install disks of
FC-4. I've just been doing this too long to base my commentary on FC-4.
I pretty much consider the FC-4 installation disks an aberration and a
nightmare that we all hope never gets repeated.

but your question was...how can I be so dogmatic? The answer is
experience. I can repair the issues that crop up from upgrades better
than perhaps 60% of the users on this list. But I would say that perhaps
as much as 20 - 30% are not capable of dealing with anything but the GUI
and they shouldn't be doing upgrades. Unless you are willing to get down
to cli, and suffer through the issues, it's not recommended in my book.

But predictability differences of upgrade vs. clean install? Do you
really think there's a debate to be had there?

Craig