[katello-devel] Cross fedora version upgrades

[Lukas Zapletal]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 06:33:48PM -0400, Justin Sherrill wrote:
> 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?

When you say support, what do you mean in particular?

Because our upgrade scripts are somehow generic, they should work on
both.

I'd rather prefer to say "we will not test this on Fedoras", but still
we should be able to help users running Katello on Fedoras, because not
all community users do want to run Katello for "production" setups as
you describe bellow. There are some users who want to hack it maybe.

> 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.

Well I see one benefit in testing upgrades on Fedoras - we can discover
future problems. I can imagine if RHEL7 will use systemd we can expect
some headaches in this area and testing upgrades on Fedoras could help
us to fix them earlier. Fedoras have new technologies we can expect in
upcoming RHEL releases.

> Thoughts?

What is your motivation to push on dropping upgrade support for Fedoras?
Do we have any issues with it?

I think we already do have beaker tests for upgrades, it is not any
extra work to run them on Fedoras as well as on RHEL6. We can even run
them on a daily basis (upgrade latest stable to nightly on all
platforms).

I would rather keep testing upgrades on Fedoras and recommending users
to use RHEL6 or clones if they want to run in production mode with
ability to upgrade. But I would not say that "we will not support
Fedoras" - I think if someone asks on the chanell, we will do our best
to help her or him anyway. I think we are good in this and we need to
keep the pace.

-- 
Later,

 Lukas "lzap" Zapletal
 #katello #systemengine