[katello-devel] Cross fedora version upgrades

[Bryan Kearney]

On 03/18/2013 09:47 AM, Justin Sherrill wrote:
> 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?
>
>
I am fine with saying we will help out, but have not tested it internally.

-- bk