preupgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 9 smooth

[stan]

Used preupgrade available at 
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=6045 to upgrade 
a Fedora 7 to Fedora 9.  Worked well and even handled problems.  Saved 
me downloading a lot of stuff I didn't want, and got all the stuff I did.

The first problem was that the root directory ran out of space after 
stage 1.  Preupgrade went into backup mode and downloaded the rest of 
the stages during upgrade.

The second problem was that the root directory ran out of space during 
transaction check.  I was able to reboot to the existing OS, remove some 
large packages (it told me how much space was needed), and restart.

The third problem was that a package was corrupt.  I was able to restart 
the computer, boot into Fedora 9, and it had installed everything except 
that package (well, the package is there.  I'll probably remove and 
reinstall it).  So the system is up and running immediately.

This was not a small upgrade as there are 3900+ packages.  At the end 
there are less than a hundred packages that didn't get updated.  Some 
from third party repositories, some are obsolete.  Very successful.  To 
find the packages that aren't updated run a command like
rpm -qa --qf "%{INSTALLTIME}\t%{INSTALLTIME:day}\t%{NAME}\t%{SUMMARY}\n" 
| sort -n  > all_installed_pkgs.txt  They will be the packages at the 
start of the file.

So kudos to the developers of preupgrade!  I found it while looking for 
a solution to the grub error 2 on live install where the MBR isn't 
written and maybe it is a good thing I had the problem. :-)

A couple of suggestions after watching the process occur.

Integrate bit torrent into this and prioritize the basic packages for 
download first (glibc, kernel, hal, etc.) so that while the downloads 
are occurring the basics can be sharing out to others.  It took 18 hours 
to download the packages.  If 10000 people are doing this, it would 
really speed up the transfer for everyone to use a torrent.  Also, for 
those of us who don't use torrent regularly, it would ensure that the 
security aspects were handled correctly.

Install the basic items first so that if there are problems the system 
is bootable so the problems can be resolved from within it.

Give people the option of keeping the packages from the anaconda install 
so they can do other upgrades.  I intend to use them for all of my 
upgrades.  Because of the error I didn't see the end game so this might 
already be there.


Again, wonderful piece of work.  I can't imagine doing anything else 
from now on.