Online distro upgrade

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Am Do, den 29.04.2004 schrieb Jeremy Katz um 17:12:
> On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 14:22 +0200, Aurelien Bompard wrote:
> > This is probably a stupid question, but anyway...

Maybe, but with ~3 releases/year and a short "lifetime" of fedora every
update cost a lot of time (especially if you have a lot of machines...).
I really would like it if it would be possible to update while you can
still work with the system.

[...]

> > Are there operations which need to be done on an unmounted filesystem ? If
> > yes, they could be done by a "very-first-start" program after anaconda's
> > work, or even something loaded in RAM.
> 
> There are some operations that require newer libraries and newer
> kernels, etc.  eg, there are a few things now that are 2.6 specific and
> count on the fact that you're running a 2.6 kernel so that you can be
> correctly set up to run the 2.6 kernel post-upgrade.  Having to do those
> from within 2.4 is extremely difficult.  And you need to use newer
> rpmlib for some features which then depends on new glibc which depends
> on ..., etc

Then my stupid question: How hard would it be to update these core
packages with on short boot from cd/dvd (~5 min) and install/update all
the other packages at the next start parallel to a normal (or
restricted) login session?

CU
thl