/usrmove? -> about the future

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2012-02-10 at 18:25 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> On 02/10/2012 05:57 PM, Reindl Harald wrote:
> > yum upgrade is not supported (due dumb pilicies away from real life)
> 
> With my QA hat on I can say with confidence that this will never be 
> officially supported.
> 
> There is no way in hell that QA can test every possible upgrade path 
> with every combination of package we ship in the distribution.
> 
> I'm frankly amazed that the anaconda/pre-upgrade path got officially 
> supported in the first place and at the same time a bit curious how that 
> came to be because I'm pretty sure officially supporting that was not 
> officially voted upon in the QA community.

'Officially supported' is always a slightly fishy phrase when it comes
to a free, volunteer effort-based, community-supported distribution. In
the end it really means very little. Well, you could say that if your
upgrade fails, you're perfectly entitled to demand a full refund. ;)

I tend to look at the release criteria as the most accurate definition
of what we really 'support', since that's what we base decisions off.
And what the release criteria (currently) actually say is, more or less,
'we must check that an upgrade of a completely clean stock install of
Fedora X-1 can be cleanly upgraded to Fedora X'. That's a rather tighter
definition than 'anaconda and preupgrade are fully supported', and
rather more realistic. It's really more the case that we try very hard
to make sure no changes are introduced that are _known to completely
break_ preupgrade or anaconda upgrades, and we work hard to fix
anaconda / preupgrade upgrade issues that are identified and filed
before release. But we don't, practically speaking, provide any kind of
guarantee that 100% of all anaconda / preupgrade upgrade attempts will
succeed. This has never been the case and, realistically, is never
likely to be the case.

> Users might finally get a proper fall back solution with btrfs ( via 
> snapshot ) for upgrades" but that's about as far as it goes with 
> "upgrading support" I would say.
> 
> Users should really view upgrading as more as yes you can but you still 
> have to fix any brokenness that might result from that upgrade.

Agreed.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net