Dry Run was: Re: Upgrading from Fedora 14 to 15 -> some problems

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2011-05-28 at 12:51 +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
> On 27/05/11 19:36, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >>
> >> Huh? The release criteria say a "fully updated default installation".
> >
> > yeah, that's what I meant. install F(N-1) with all default options,
> > update, then run the upgrade.
> >
> > the key is that we don't test any kind of real-world configuration, with
> > anything other than default apps, actual user data in place and so on.
> 
> 
> Is there any method (excluding yum distro-sncc --releasever=FN)
> where by a user can  do a test update?
> 
> A check for problems on the menu:
> or a simple app install on FN-1
> "Can I run FN"
> 
> Which would list out possible problems that may have to be overcome.
> Currently beyond my limited abilities.

I think this is kind of a case of 'the map is the territory'; yum will
warn you about some problems it can detect pre-transaction, but there
are some problems it can only find in actually _doing the transaction_,
and anaconda is similar. I don't know how feasible it would be to add a
dry run mode to either, Seth could answer for yum, I guess.

Then there are problems which wouldn't be package transaction problems,
which are beyond the scope of yum or anaconda, really, to detect / warn
about; the only way we could realistically warn you about those would be
if we knew about them beforehand based on experimental testing, in which
case we'd have to actually do the testing, and we may as well just fix
the problems rather than write a clever script to warn you about them...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net