upgrade to shrike from 7.3, results

[Jurvis LaSalle]

On Dec 3, 2004, at 10:28 AM, mark wrote:

>> Subject: Re: upgrade to shrike from 7.3, results
>> From: Jurvis LaSalle <lasalle at bard.edu>
>> Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 12:12:35 -0500
>> On Dec 2, 2004, at 11:35 AM, mark wrote:
>>> After having complete and total failure on the "upgrade" - if 
>>> anyone's paying any attention from RedHat, this is *not* acceptable 
>>> in a business environment, or for desktop users - every single time 
>>> the python scripts with anaconda *failed* with unhandled exceptions, 
>>> I went on to Plan B.
>> [snip]
>> Congratulations!  You've upgraded from a release that Red Hat stopped 
>> supporting December '03 to a release that Red Hat stopped supporting 
>> April '04.  It's clear from your actions that you've done very little 
>> research into which upgrade paths Red Hat actually supports.
> <snip>
> You're missing the point: perhaps you could describe your recent 
> upgrades, and whether the "upgrade from a previous release" actually 
> *works*, rather than crashing anaconda 100% of the time?
>
> How 'bout telling us all how you personally upgraded from shrike to, 
> say, fedora 1 or 2 (gee, I could have *sworn* fedora was a different 
> mailing list, but that's not the point), and how the *upgrade* - NOT 
> reinstall - went. I'd personally be interested in hearing that, and 
> whether any of what's in shrike is not upgraded, or left out, or what 
> I'd have to worry about in a ->UPGRADE<-, not a reinstall, to have a 
> running system like the one I was upgrading from, at the end of the 
> upgrade.
>
> 	mark
>
> PS I'm running shrike, with (of course) upgraded libs and kernel. I am 
> *not* going to put a version of Linux on that I *haven't* run, for 
> someone with a very short temper, who uses the system like a "typical 
> user".... <g>

	Forgive me for being so glib yesterday.  Your post upset me for 
several reasons mainly stemming from what I termed "very little 
research" on your part.  To begin, you described "upgrading" to Red Hat 
9, an operating system that NO business has any business installing at 
this time.  You should be installing either RH Enterprise Linux or 
White box Linux if you want RHEL but are too cheap or too broke to pay 
for it.
	Of course, you would have wanted to "upgrade" to one of these distros. 
  My understanding is that Red Hat only supported upgrading from one 
release to the next, no skipping from 7 to 9.  I don't think that there 
is even an upgrade path from ( RHL || FC ) to RHEL.  Perhaps your real 
outrage is that the Anaconda installer presented an upgrade button for 
you to check and then didn't work. This option obviously did not work 
and arguably should not have been offered.  I personally have *never* 
performed an upgrade.  My file server ran 7.3 until it went unsupported 
on 12/31/03.  I was on the list at the time and knew that Red Hat's 
distro map was in flux.  Red Hat 9 was due to go unsupported soon after 
and I wanted a longer product cycle than the 6 month release time RH 
was pushing with Fedora Core.   Hence, I dumped all files to tape, 
ponied up the dough for RHEL AS v3, installed and restored my data and 
have been happy ever since (and will be for the next ~4 years unless I 
want to reinstall for some new feature).
	Note that I didn't *have* to dump and reinstall.  I chose to.  My 
partitioning scheme separated OS specific partitions from data specific 
partitions.  Thus I could have just left /home alone, backed up /etc 
for future reference and overwritten /, /usr, /var, etc.  Instead I 
chose to perform a complete reinstall because I wanted to use LVM to 
manage my partitions more conveniently.
	I'm not sure why I have explained this to you in such detail.  You 
seem to expect that every upgrade path between every version of Red Hat 
is supported.  I am almost 100% sure that it is not the case.  If you 
can find a URL for me where Red Hat states this, I will apologize 
further for the misinformation I'm spreading.  If you can't, would 
please stop expecting the free distro you downloaded to be a magic OS 
bullet, capable of knowing and doing all.  Upgrades can be very easy if 
you have partitioned your hard drive wisely or they can require great 
feats of disk juggling if you lacked the proper foresight.  Either way, 
I think it's silly for you to blame Red Hat for anything except not 
greying out that pesky upgrade button for you.

Jurvis LaSalle