FC4->FC5 upgrade options

[Jim Cornette]

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.

Not all of the time. I prefer to upgrade over installing because of 
applications that I use might be complex enough to setup that 
reinstalling them again would not be a trivial undertaking.

> 
> 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.

Regressions that might only be due to some problem with the installer 
but not with the installed system versions recently bit me from FC5T2 to 
FC5T3. If FC5 is released and there is a regression in the installer, 
there is no easy way to get the system freshly installed. My problem 
with regression was pinned down during the shorter cycles and was due to 
kudzu entries for USB DVD drives. If regression catches someone from the 
final releases, they are stuck unless peroidic boot.iso images are 
released for corrected hardware vs. installer problems.
In these instances the only path is to upgrade from a prior release that 
is installable and using yum or another method to upgrade the components.
I would hope that discs  which incorporate the latest fixes are made 
available in the repos during the FC5 cycle. Additionally, it would be 
great to be able to network install from a repo and obtain the most 
current version of FC5 without the post-install downloading of a lot of 
program updates.
I suppose adding an updated boot.iso into the fedora-updates repo for 
FC5 would be a logical location for easier locating and for maintaining 
such an animal.

> 
> 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.
> 

I had to install FC5T2 and then yum up to FC5T3 because of regressions 
from test 2 to test 3. Yum, rpm and other updating schemes sometimes is 
the easiest way if not the only way to move forward. If some sort of 
scheme was developed to make a periodically released boot.iso, the need 
for alternatives like yum updating from workin releases would not be as 
much of a problem. I'm sure that it will still be needed with some 
hardware combinations unfortunately.

Jim

> 
> 


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