UsrMove feature breaking "yum upgrade" upgrades from older releases to F17?

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Sat Jan 28 04:14:59 UTC 2012


Adam Williamson wrote:
> The reason yum upgrades are not supported is specifically to leave
> open the possibility of doing significant changes that are not
> compatible with yum upgrades, if the significant change has a large
> enough benefit to be worth the pain of breaking the yum upgrade path.
> 
> Ergo you can't simply state that 'anything that breaks yum upgrade is
> unacceptable'. Or else we'd support yum upgrades.

Well, IMHO it *should* be supported. It's by far the most reliable upgrade 
method we have.

Upgrading with the DVD is just unsupportable due to upgrade path issues 
(which no amount of QA can prevent because updates to Fn-1 can go out AFTER 
the Fn release, so you can't block Fn for them; thus, only Fn updates, not 
Fn GA, will have a package with a higher EVR than Fn-1 updates; for example, 
unless you upgraded practically on release day, upgrading from a fully-
updated F10 to F11 using the DVD left you with a broken yum!), and I think 
it's a big mistake to try to support it in its current state (including 
updates from the repository during DVD upgrades would fix that, but that 
would also require other changes to Anaconda to work well, such as support 
for more general networking setups and package signature checks), and an 
even bigger mistake to advertise that as the "recommended" method to 
upgrade.

Preupgrade does not work on all setups (the /boot partition size being the 
main limitation) and also has other bugs plain yum does not have (code which 
is exercised twice a year will just not get the same amount of testing as 
code which is used several times a week for routine system updates).

        Kevin Kofler



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