Pipe dreams: yum-based anaconda a step towards on-line yum-based upgrades?

[Matthew Miller]

So, I noticed while doing my first FC5t1 install the upgrades aren't
currently supported in the reworked anaconda. Fair enough; there's a lot of
changes under the hood. But that got me thinking: hey, maybe this is a great
time to get it so that "yum upgrade" can actually easily bring one from one
FC release to the next. (More realistically, maybe FC6 is a great time. But
now might be a time to start thinking about it.)

I know there's historically been a lot of wacky special-casing in Anaconda,
much of it legacy cruft, and much of it kinda important for, y'know,
actually working upgrades.

With switching to a yum-based backend, I imagine that much of this cruft
must be updated. Maybe Jeremy's doing it this way already, but what about
packaging that special-case knowledge into a "distroupgrade" yum plugin
instead of into Anaconda itself, wherever possible? (Some things are easier
done off-line, of course, but maybe those could be made to happen in
firstboot or so?)

As an experiment in support of this hallucinogen-addled fantasy, I installed
a fresh system FC4 system (Workstation install), used yum to apply all
current updates, and then changed the repo config to point at FC5t1. I first
ran yum upgrade yum and then a full "yum -y upgrade".

After some time, this failed, because iiimf-libs is gone, with no
replacement or nothing to obsolete it but with a chain of dependencies.

Quick fix was to just remove that package and try again.

Now, two things -- initscript and kudzu -- failed because of requirements on
kernel < 2.6.12 and 2.6.13, respectively. After some head-scratching, this
turned out to be caused by Conflicts statements and the previously-installed
2.6.11 kernel. (The newly installed-then-yum-upgraded system had the
original FC4 2.6.11 and the newest FC4 2.6.14 both installed, of course.)

Sort ironically, the installonlyn plugin would have actually corrected this
situation, because the result after the upgrade would be to have the FC4
2.6.14 plus the FC5 2.6.14. Anyway, I worked around this by simply removing
the old 2.6.11 kernel.

After that, the yum upgrade went basically fine, and after Some Time passed,
I have what appears to be a fully functional FC5 system. I haven't poked
around too much to find broken spots, and there were a lot of messages about
.rpmsave and .rpmnew, so looking at those is probably in order. But I can
log in to Gnome, browse the web, run OpenOffice, and so on.

But overall, seemed like a pretty successful experiment. And, given the
super-short lifespan of FC releases, something I'd really be interested in
having as an option.

Thoughts, anyone?

  -- smokin' the good stuff,
          Matthew

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>