FC5 T3 -> FC6 Development?

[David Timms]

Dan Thurman wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-03-25 at 05:04 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 15:30 -0800, Dan Thurman wrote:
>>> Folks,
>>>
>>> I was a but busy and I am currently in a FC5 T3 setup, so
>>> my question is, do I just stay in this environment, and
>>> simply 'yum update' to get into the FC6 level or do I have
>>> to burn any iso's and reinstall everything or what?
>> It's generally a good idea to do a reinstallation. If you simply run yum
>> update, you end up with pre-FC6 rawhide which is now boiling hot. That
>> you only want to do if you would prefer to continue testing.
There are days in testing where an update requires 500M of downloads, 
and then something needs a new release and it happens again the next 
day. You might rather your PC was a useful tool rather than forever 
downloading new packages.

My advice: download FC5 and install. If you have separate partitions for 
/ and /home, note down the partition information (to use during install) 
and ensure all the things you want to keep are under /home .

Then reboot in single user mode, and mv /home/your-user-name to 
/home/name-old or similar.

Reboot with CD/dvd for install, and ensure you choose custom 
partitioning. You then need to tell the installer which partition to use 
as which:
/boot +format
/ +format
/home don't format.
Then you'll have a complete FC5 install, but haven't lost any info that 
was still on your disk under /home. However, the user account is created 
new so that any weird stuff from the old install is avoided.

>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Testing
>>
>> Otherwise, you might get the fedora-release package from one of the FC5
>> mirrors, make sure you have the development repositories disabled and
>> then run yum update.
>>
>> Rahul
> 
> Hmmm...  ok.  Well, I ran 'yum update' just for fun but not
> intending to accept the update but I was never given that
> chance.  It appears that it is looking for dependencies so
> it bombed.
yum update indeed checks for updates -> dependencies, and only if all 
dependencies can be resolved, then it asks do you want to go ahead. It 
only finds out this stuff by downloading the repo information, then the 
rpm headers it needs, in an iterative process until a dependency can not 
be found, or it has all the bits to do a successful rpm transaction.

In this way yum / rpm protect you from what would be a bad situation !
...
> Also, There is another response from poster that replied I can just
> 'yum update' if I wanted to continue testing but now I cannot decide
> which pathway I want to take....
Take the FC5 path if you want a machine that is reliable and doesn't 
take a lot of your time; see Rahul's response and look at the paragraphs 
in the section: Initial Expectations

> If I do not want to continue to test and go to FC5 from FC5-T3, what
> exactly would I end up with?
Depends on whether you ever saw problems during the test releases

> Would I (eventually) get a full production
> release as if I installed it from scratch sans the stuff I installed
> outside of the FC5-T3 release?
No, some testing packages might have set weird options, or have left 
over binaries that could cause problems. Such an upgrade is also 
considered unsupportable. If you found a bug, you would need to 
reinstall a new FC5 system to ensure you don't have some previously 
solved problem getting at you.

> If I want to continue testing, do you suggest that I just go ahead
> and do a 'yum update' but with exclusions of dependencies until
> eventually I get these dependencies installed later, somehow?
If you use pup (Software Updater), you can deselect packages whose 
dependencies can't be resolved (with some trial and error).

If you are still interested in testing, perhaps install FC5 and enable 
the updates-testing repo, then you get advance test versions of packages 
that are being updated for FC5 (usually to fix bugs, not add new 
functionality). This is still a help because it allows the developers to 
test the new packages on more varied hardware (yours). If you see a 
problem, check the test-list and bugzilla ASAP, so that a developer can 
see there is something amiss and choose to hold back on pushing the test 
package into the mainstream FC5 updates.

DaveT.