Proposed F19 Feature: Fedora Upgrade - using yum

[Kevin Kofler]

Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> Note that this doesn't fix problems caused by dropped packages, that block
> other packages from being updated.

That's a problem for all upgrade methods, they might leave your system with 
broken dependencies instead of erroring out, but in the end the problem is 
always there. It's not solvable as long as we're as happy to drop packages 
as we are now, rather than keeping them working by rebuilding them even if 
there's no active maintainer.

> One possiblity here would be to create a special package that obsoletes
> all of the dropped packages from the last release (or two depending on how
> far back you want to yum update from).

Please no! Many of those packages keep working just fine. And where not, 
it's better to get a clear error message and to remove the offending 
packages manually and explicitly than to have the upgrade silently (well, 
with a one-line notice buried under many other lines of text) removing a 
package one may be depending on!

> There are going to be some releases where you need to do things outside of
> yum to upgrade.

Then that's a problem with the feature which requires you to do that, and 
should be a showstopper! (Yes, I think UsrMove should not have been 
allowed.)

        Kevin Kofler