Release criterion proposal: upgrade methods

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 26 September 2012 01:10, drago01 <drago01 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 5:20 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 23:01 -0400, Richard Ryniker wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe someone with more fortitude (intellectual honesty? discipline?)
>>> than I will kill upgrade, and make the world a better place.  Or at least
>>> document that "upgrade" is offered only on a "good effort" basis, with no
>>> guarantee or support.
>>
>> That's more or less my take on it, and why I'd like to use the word
>> 'recommended' rather than 'supported'. I agree that it's very difficult
>> to convincingly suggest that upgrades are in any reasonable definition
>> 'supported'.
>>
>> (As a sidebar, it's worth noting that major version upgrades are
>> unsupported for RHEL, and Microsoft rarely offers true 'upgrades'
>> between Windows builds any more, and I think never recommended them for
>> enterprise use: vastly better funded and more conservative operating
>> system projects than Fedora nevertheless have the same problems. It all
>> rather indicates to me that 'supporting' major version upgrades of
>> operating systems is rather close to being an impossibility.)
>
> I have been always upgrading my systems, I do never reinstall (I never
> tried to skip a release but from N-1 to N always has been fine for me;
> the only time I did that was to move from i386 to x86_64 years ago).
> Also Vista -> 7 upgrade worked just fine for me. Same for OSX
> upgrades. Other linux distributions manage to support that as well.

Word definition problem here. What you mean by supported is not what
Adam andt others mean by supported. I think getting those definitions
in order would help get this conversation going versus sidelined.

The word supported has various legal meanings usually that when it is
said there is a guarentee of it working and that it will be fixed if
it does not work.

Microsoft, Apple and other companies have upgrade methods that mostly
work. They don't "support" them without an expensive support contract
and in many cases without a field engineer looking at what you are
going to upgrade and doing the work themselves (depending on the
system and level of contract.)

 A user can upgrade your XP -> Vista, XP -> 7?, 7->8 etc and it will
mostly work. On the offhand case that the box does not boot afterwords
or has problems.. they will be told to backup the system, install a
fresh copy of the OS, reinstall any 3rd party applications and then
restore user data from backups. In their test cases they will do
general upgrade testing but they have shipped where it just doesn't
work on some systems (Apple is easier to test for since they control
the hardware and have made installation of software very sandboxed so
that it mostly works.)



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"Don't derail a useful feature for the 99% because you're not in it."
Linus Torvalds
"Years ago my mother used to say to me,... Elwood, you must be oh
so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I
recommend pleasant. You may quote me."  —James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd