Testing F9 - what happens when it goes final?

[Will Woods]

On Mar 31, 2008, at 12:45 PM, Steve Dowe wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Sorry if this is a totally lame question, but I'm currently "testing"
> (ok, informally trying it out) and can't find an answer on this:
>
> According to the release schedule
> (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/Schedule) the Fedora 9 beta
> packages get branched on 8 April.  When this happens, does that mean
> it's possible and/or standard practice to change repository  
> location(s)
> in yum and continue to update packages, or do the snapshots, preview  
> and
> final releases each require a total reinstall?  Sorry for being so
> naive..!

No, it's a good question. In short: No reinstall is necessary.

The Beta release (like all the pre-releases) is basically just a  
snapshot of Rawhide. So you'll continue getting updates from the  
preconfigured rawhide repos right up through the final release.

When the final release comes around we update the fedora-release  
package to change your default repos to point at the newly-created  
stable repositories for F9.

So, if you install the Beta and keep applying updates, it will  
magically evolve into F9 final without any intervention needed[1].

-w

[1] BIG FAT CAVEAT: As with all test releases, there's the possibility  
of bad packages going out that will require minor fixing by hand (like  
xulrunner around F9a). But the overall process is still basically  
automatic.