On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 1:28 AM, David G.Miller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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.
All upgrades can be problematic whether Fedora or Ubuntu/Debian (where
upgrades are used much more often than in the TUV/Fedora world).
Preupgrade had its share of problems in the past too, perhaps not as
many as fedup has currently but the latter's still a young tool,
relying on new features of systemd, dracut, and anaconda (all three of
which are in heavy development).
It's now the only approved upgrade mechanism and is therefore a
release-blocking piece of the Fedora installation infrastructure: "For
each one of the release-blocking package sets ('minimal', and the
package sets for each one of the release-blocking desktops), it must
be possible to successfully complete an upgrade from a fully updated
installation of the previous stable Fedora release with that package
set installed, using all officially recommended upgrade mechanisms.
The upgraded system must meet all release criteria."
So "official and somewhat buggy" would be more accurate.
> 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.
Exactly. It's far simpler to upgrade six-month-old key
packages/executables/libraries than 2-3-4-year-old key
packages/executables/libraries. So the likelihood of a fedup for EL is
low. Anyway, I don't see how upgrades would be OK'd in some
environments, especially given how quickly and simply a VM can be
killed and installed from scratch.
> 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.
If you package and script your configuration, there's no such thing as
a complex system.
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