F7 to F8 upgrade - Anaconda nightmare

[Timothy Murphy]

I tried upgrading a ThinkPad T43 from Fedora 7 to 8
and met the familiar hanging syndrome.

I followed the recipe 
at <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common>,
downloading
<http://katzj.fedorapeople.org/updates-f8-yumloop.img>
and appending "updates" to the kernel command.

The latter seemed to work, since /tmp/updates
contained the updates*.img file 
(and all other files in the same directory).

However, I saw no evidence that the updates*.img file
was actually invoked.
In any case, the hanging was not cured.

I wondered how anaconda knows which file to use to update?
Does it use all *.img files?
Is one meant to change the name of the downloaded file?

As far as I can tell, Anaconda upgrade has not worked
for most people - it worked for me on one computer,
but not on a second.
This is not good;
if the developers cannot get anaconda to upgrade reasonably well
they should remove the option.

As a practical matter, I did not see any way
of determining what exactly anaconda was doing
during the eternal "Checking dependencies ...".
If one knew it was stuck checking dependencies on one file
it would be easy to tell that the process had failed.
As it is, there seems to be no way of knowing
except to wait for several hours.

Anaconda: 1 out of 10.