update mechanism for new releases

[Christopher Stone]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 9:27 AM, Matthew
Woehlke<mw_triad at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 11:05 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>>
>>> The problem with preupgrade is that it needs user interaction and a
>>> lot of space. It downloads the distro update locally, reboots the
>>> machine and then runs anaconda.
>>
>> Well, as yum doesn't group transactions, yum upgrades also require a lot
>> of space (enough to store the entire set of upgrade packages, as they're
>> _all_ downloaded prior to the operation).
>
> ...if you just run 'yum upgrade' and not 'yum upgrade <list>'. I don't know
> that I've /ever/ done all-at-once, if only because of more risk of the
> transaction taking so long that something bad happens (e.g. power failure).
> F10 -> F11 was just especially bad due to all of KDE needing to be upgraded
> in order to upgrade yum (due to openssl deps).
>
> The trick, as I've discovered, is not to reboot in between chunks ;-).

hahah I remember those days before preupgrade came along when I had to
do upgrades using yum and I just did like one letter of the alphabet
at a time.

yum/rpm should be able to cleanly handle and recover from an interrupt
at any time such as a power failure.  AFAIK, yum/rpm does not handle
power outages very well.  Microsoft might even be better at disaster
recovery during an upgrade than we are.