Proposed F19 Feature: Fedora Upgrade - using yum

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 23.01.13 18:04, Jaroslav Reznik (jreznik at redhat.com) wrote:

> FedUp is in fact yum-upgrade as well, but in dracut environment (aka off-line 
> upgrade). Some devels say that offline upgrade is only way. But on-line upgrade 
> is possible. E.g in Debian world it is even prefered method. In Fedora exist 
> upgrade using yum as unofficial method for long time.
> 
> A lot of people are using upgrade using yum for long time and the "problem 
> ratio" was at least on pair with Anaconda upgrade. In fact most problems comes 
> from improper packaging. E.g. maintainer forgot to obsolete, so during upgrade 
> user get file conflict. Once these problems are reported and fixed the upgrade is 
> without problem.

I'd strongly say "NO" to this. Not because I would have a problem with
people doing non-fedup upgrades (I tend to upgrade my machines with yum
myself, too). However, making this officially supported, and advertising
this as a feature appears to be the wrong move to me.

The thing is that doing on-line updates only works for stuff you can
restart, and that doesn't mind that things are not atomically
updated. However, much (most?) of our code isn't like that. Anybody who
tried to update the Firefox RPM while it is running knows that this
doesn't end well, and you frequently have to manually kill firefox to
get it back into a usual state.

Doing manual on-line upgrades with "yum distro-sync" is a fine
thing to do, but this requires people to understand that things might go
wrong, and requires a certain skill set from people so that they know
what to do if things go wrong (like for example knowing how to kill
firefox from the command line). But by making this an officially
supported feature fedora would suggest this as something that would work
for anybody, without any additional knowledge, and Fedora would have to
deal with the additional support work/bug burden this creates.

It's OK if an RPM for this enters the archive, it's OK if people who
know how to fix their machines use this, it's OK if people suggest this
as hidden functionality. But I think it would be a big mistake for
Fedora to advertise this as official feature, and to accept the support
burden this creates.

Fedora doesn't have unlimited resources, we have more than enough bugs
to fix anyway, making online updates an officially supported feature
would amplify this disparity.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.