Fedora Core 5 Test 3 Slip

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 11:46 -0500, Brian Long wrote:
> I would agree with you.  Inside my company, many folks have switched to
> self-supported Ubuntu or Gentoo because of the rolling-upgrade
> functionality where they don't have to re-install the entire OS to get
> the latest features.  It would be really cool if Jeremy and the rest of
> the installer team worked to make rolling upgrades between releases of
> Fedora (and RHEL) possible with standard yum commands instead of
> requiring a new install/upgrade procedure each time.

The amount of pain involved here ends up being astronomical for some
types of changes.  Think about things like all new tools for 2.6,
static /dev -> udev, what to do with all sorts of things moving out from
under you from /usr/X11R6 -> /usr.  Things do mostly end up working (I
do an update to rawhide on my laptop anywhere between daily and weekly
-- and it hasn't had an install since I got it about two years ago), but
it's hardly the sort of thing that's really supportable.

> Internally, we don't support Anaconda's "upgrade" mode because it's had
> issues over the years and we don't want to clean up the mess  :)  This
> means we have to tell folks to reinstall their OS between major versions
> of RHEL and the same holds true between FC2 -> FC3 -> FC4.

So, you're saying that instead you want to support upgrades where you
could be running on top of anything with any sort of processes running?
It's far saner to support doing upgrades in a known and consistent
environment (ie, the installer stage2) as opposed to your running
system.

Jeremy