Graphical Distribution Upgrades

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2015-04-07 at 06:45 -0400, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> > Broken from the "Summary of Reddit thread".
> > 
> > Fedora's lack of a graphical major-version updater comes up
> > constantly. I think it's probably time to start brainstorming how 
> > to
> > solve it, with a stated intention of having things work for 
> > upgrading
> > Fedora 23 -> Fedora 24 *at minimum* and an ideal situation of 
> > having
> > Fedora 22 -> Fedora 23 upgrades work (with changes made during 
> > Fedora
> > 22's stable lifecycle to support this).
> > 
> > So to brainstorm, I'll start with a list (in no particular order) 
> > of
> > things I think we want as goals (not necessary technical goals but
> > user experience goals) and then go into a few known technical
> > enhancements that need to be accomplished to get there. (Note: 
> > many of
> > the experience goals may already be possible with some combination 
> > of
> > GNOME Software and/or fedup, but they are included for 
> > completeness).
> > 
> > Much discussion welcome!
> 
> One things to add to user experience is integration with Preupgrade
> Assistant. One can argue it's not for Workstation use case but for
> Server but one of the ideas was to support desktop upgrades aka when
> for example an IM client is no longer default, say hey, we have very
> new shining IM client and you can even migrate your history via...
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org//wiki/Changes/Preupgrade_Assistant
> 

I don't think this is part of my ideal graphical upgrade experience, 
tbh. It is basically a collection of workarounds for all the places 
where upgrade doesn't work.

If we want to discuss better approaches to upgrading a system, here is 
an alternative design: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Migration The 
premise there is that it is much better to do a selective 
export/import of your important data, and do a fresh install, instead 
of trying to manage all the ways in which a huge, system-wide upgrade 
can fail. Of course, this is quite different from what fedup is doing 
today, and we don't have any code for this.