Does Adrian up2date allow upgrades from one release to another

[Barry K. Nathan]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 12:59:00PM +0800, Yusuf Goolamabbas wrote:
> Does the new up2date by Adrian Likins allow for remotely upgrading
> servers from one release to another

It's actually been possible with previous up2date releases as well
(rpm -Uvh the redhat-release RPM from the new Red Hat release, (maybe?)
re-register the system, then use up2date to update everything). It's
also possible to use up2date-config to force up2date to identify the
system as a different version, but AFAICT it's impossible to use that to
go from an earlier release to Red Hat 9.

This type of upgrade is not supported by Red Hat, but it's possible. It
can sometimes be a bit annoying to solve dependency problems that come up
(basically you have to remove conflicting packages), and there are a few
other gotchas.  Going from Red Hat 7.x to 9, here are the worst gotchas
I've encountered:

+ You need to update glib2 before pango, or else pango doesn't quite
install properly.

+ You need to "up2date gnome-session" after you've done everything else,
or else you can't log in using GNOME.

+ For some reason, if you didn't install all of the errata for your 7.x
release, rpm will segfault after RH 9's glibc is installed (and things
will be *really* hairy!). This doesn't happen if you've applied all of
the errata for your 7.x release first.

For 8.0 to 9:

+ You need to update rpm before glibc or else rpm will segfault.

+ You need to update glib2 before pango (as with 7.x -> 9).

I have noticed no gremlins of this sort going from 9 to severn.

Overall, this is a considerably more time-consuming method than
upgrading the normal way. You need to consider whether it outweighs the
travel time/effort, and how much you need to keep the machine up and
running during the upgrade (X11 desktop stuff *will* start glitching up
during the upgrade for anyone sitting at the machine, but servers will
keep going with no problems, in my experience).

-Barry K. Nathan <barryn at pobox.com>