[katello-devel] Cross fedora version upgrades

[Justin Sherrill]

On 03/18/2013 06:17 AM, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
> 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?
Test, help users with, and fix bugs with.

>
> 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.

Do they plan to upgrade across fedora versions?  Get stuck on older 
katello versions?    Agreed, the users can try it for themselves and we 
can say it might work, just that we do not support/test it.

>
>> 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.
Across the same version of fedora or across different versions of 
fedora?  I don't think supporting across different versions will teach 
us much, across the same version, possibly.

>> Thoughts?
> What is your motivation to push on dropping upgrade support for Fedoras?
> Do we have any issues with it?
The main concern (as release nanny of Katello 1.3), was we have not in 
the past supported (tested, documented) upgrades across fedora 
releases.  For 1.3, however if this is the case there would not be any 
supported upgrade path on fedora.  I was trying to determine if that is 
acceptable, and to nail down a policy going forward.

> 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).
Not across fedora versions I'm guessing.  Is this also testing that 
everything is actually functional after the upgrade? (i.e. system 
registration, rpm downloading all works?)
>
> 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.
If we're putting the work into testing upgrades on Fedora, why recommend 
they use something else?


-Justin