Tom H <tomh0665@...> writes:

> 
> On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 1:25 AM, David G.Miller <dave@...> wrote:
> > Jeffrey Anderson <jdanderson <at> ...> writes:
> >>
> >> The message I get from the official voices in this thread is that there is
> >> no supported method of upgrading major versions, only minor point
> >> versions. It's no big deal. I just did a fresh install, then some
> >> cfengine magic and am back up and running in a couple hours.  I was just
> >> surprised because major version upgrades have been available for every
> >> version of SL and TUV for the past 15+ years, and when the install media
> >> did not give me that option here I wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking
> >> something.
> >
> > Intriguingly, Fedora now has a semi-official upgrade process called FedUp.
> > It is very much a "work in progress" and has been known to fail rather
> > spectacularly but TUV through Fedora seems to be moving towards eventually
> > supporting major version upgrades. Or FedUp may never make it out of
Fedora...
> 
> Why semi-official?! It's the official replacement of preupgrade and is
> the only recommended method to perform a Fedora upgrade given that the
> new Anaconda has lost its upgrade capability.
> 
> I once mentioned that I'd love to see preupgrade in EL and Nico
> pointed out that upgrading a six-month-old installation is far simpler
> than upgrading EL-X to EL-X+1 with the large jump in versions between
> the latter two.
> 
> 
I say semi=official since it seems that the preferred method is still a
clean install and FedUp seems to have more than a few issues.  At least
that's what I read on the Fedora user list.

The problem of upgrading from FC-n to FC-n+1 is basically the same as
upgrading EL-n to EL-n+1.  There tends to be more of them and that means
working out things like dependencies and obsolete packages is even uglier. 
You also run into TUV wants an installation of EL that is rock solid.  If an
upgraded FC system is unstable, that's almost to be expected.  If an
upgraded EL system is unstable, TUV gets bad press.

I'm guessing you could back-port FedUp to EL and have a reasonable shot at
upgrading EL-n to EL-n+1.  I wouldn't want to guarantee that an arbitrarily
complex installation will work though and the people who really want to
upgrade are those with really complex systems that they don't want to have
to re-create from a clean installation.  So we end up stuck with the
contradiction that simple installations could probably be upgraded but the
complex installations that people really want to upgrade can't.

Cheers,
Dave

Cheers,
Dave