[katello-devel] Cross fedora version upgrades

[Justin Sherrill]

Hi All,

With the upcoming Katello 1.3 release we are only support RHEL 6 & 
Fedora 18, which means this is the first katello release that does not 
continue support across a single Fedora version (Previously fedora 
16).   Katello 1.2 was released with upgrade instructions, but they did 
not cover upgrading from Fedora 16 to Fedora 17 (so i am going to assume 
it was not supported or tested).  So keep in mind today that we really 
do not have an official policy on upgrading across fedora versions.

Due to the volatile nature of Fedora upgrades (especially going from 
fedora 16 to fedora 18 which uses two different upgrade mechanisms), I 
am proposing to only support upgrades to from Katello 1.2 to 1.3 on RHEL 6.

What are people's thoughts on that?


Katello 1.3 is somewhat special in that katello 1.2 and 1.3 do not share 
a fedora version in common, but going forward what are thoughts around 
either:

a) Not supporting upgrades on fedora at all, only supported on RHEL 6 
and CentOS 6.
b) Not supporting upgrades from/to different versions of fedora (i.e. 
Katello 1.X to 1.Y is supported on Fedora N, but not from N to N+1)
c) Only supporting upgrades from/to different versions of fedora via 
backup/import of data and certs.

Keep in mind that no matter what we choose, we can always re-evaluate 
our policy due to user requests.  To me testing two additional upgrade 
scenarios is not worth the time unless people actually use these upgrade 
paths.

My Vote is for a)  (and here's why).  If a user is using katello and 
wanting to upgrade from one version to another across many months, they 
are likely to want long term stability.  Upgrading your operating system 
to new major versions ever 6-12 months does not give you long term 
stability.  Most users that are interested in running a katello server 
in production will not use Fedora simply due to the quick release cycle, 
they will instead use RHEL or CentOS. which is where I think we need to 
target our resources.  So my vote would be to:

- Only support upgrades on RHEL and CentOS
- Support CentOS with each release and make sure it works (There are 
reports that it does not work currently)
- Harden our backup/restore guide and utilities

Thoughts?

-Justin