On Wed, 2015-11-25 at 16:51 -0500, Richard Ryniker wrote:
A month is a pretty long time in Fedora development
True, but a month is only available if the problem is reported on day 1. If it takes a week or two for a user to report a problem, that interval lessens the remaining time to EOL.
On the other other hand, you can test upgrades at any time, with dnf- system-upgrade. We're already testing 22-24 upgrades daily in openQA at present.
On the other hand, there is no prohibition against a fix after EOL.
There is, in fact; you can't push updates for EOL releases, it's simply disabled by policy.
We also do not know there will be serious problems. We know it is impossible to test more than a miniscule fraction of possible upgrade cases. That does not mean there will be lots of bugs, it means we have little confidence the test plan has found most bugs. We might say there is no reason to believe experience with the current release will be any worse than the last.
This is basically what I'm saying: we can't actually make any guarantees about *most* upgrade experiences, and N-2 upgrades aren't really some special case which is massively more likely to go wrong than any other. Will we have people who have issues doing N-2 upgrades? Probably, sure. Do we have people who have issues doing N-1 upgrades? yep! This isn't something new. We *do*, I think, mention in all the relevant documentation that upgrades are complex operations and success is never guaranteed, that's not what 'supported' means, especially in this context.
As far as I know, this is the first time "dnf system-upgrade" has been generally available for a release-skip upgrade. It is way too early to have any historical perspective.
F23 is the first release where the dnf-system-upgrade mechanism has been available, yes. But it's really not hugely different from fedup - it's just an even lighter implementation of the same basic idea (just boot to a minimal environment and run a dnf transaction). The experience of fedup should be a reasonable indicator of future dnf- system-upgrade experiences.