Yum upgrade vs preupgrade - readahead etc

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 16:39 +0100, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> 2008/10/20 Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com>:
> > On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 10:04 +0100, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> >> After yum upgrading my way to F10 from F9, the experience as already
> >> reported was pretty painless. The only problem is that some packages,
> >> key to Fedora 10 features, do not get picked up with the update. e.g.
> >> readahead, and grub doesn't seem to have been updated either.
> >>
> >> A few questions:
> >>
> >> * Would the same problem occur if I'd used preupgrade?
> >
> > The bootloader gets reinstalled on upgrade (via preupgrade or just a
> > usual anaconda upgrade).  New packages, though, don't get pulled in
> > because it's too hard to tell _which_ new packages someone might want.
> > And even more the case with something like readahead which existed in
> > the past.
> 
> I'm not particularly knowledgable about this, so it's a bit of a shot
> in the dark but...
> 
> Would it be possible to reference some kind of package manifest that
> defines the default package set of a release from preupgrade? It could
> then compare the currently installed packages to that list,
> upgrade/reinstall packages that are on both lists, and install
> packages that are only on the new package manifest?
> 
> There's probably a million reasons why that's a bad idea, but I'd be
> interested to hear a couple of them at least...

Package splits, package renames, going between multiple releases to name
a few.  The single biggest objective behind an upgrade is "move to newer
version of stuff, try to disrupt as little as possible".  

Jeremy