A preupgrade adventure - F16 to F17

[Martin Langhoff]

Just an informational anecdote. My main dev machine is a vanilla
Lenovo X220 laptop, running an up-to-date F16. At OLPC, we are damned
close to *shipping* a F17-based distro on our XO laptops, so I thought
it'd be good to update.

Worried about /usr move, I decided to DTRT: use preupgrade.

First, preupgrade completely hides grubby errors, and tells you
everthing's peachy. This cannot be a feature. I managed to hit a few
grubby errors, and without the debug output from preupgrade-cli
showing the grubby command it's running, I'd still be scratching my
head...

So grub configs were not being updated, for two reasons

 - My machine does not have /boot/grub/grub.cfg, it has grub.conf
instead, so I hit BZ#841976 . Unsure why these conffiles are changing
names, this was a fresh F16 install back when F16 was new.

 - Added the missing grub.cfg, grubby segfaults (BZ#841979). Ummpf!

 - The preupgrade wikipage helpfully provides instructions to edit
grub.conf by hand. Completely wrong instructions. You don't want the
/boot prefix there. You don't want "savedefault". You probably want to
ensure you see the menu.

I am no expert on what params the preupgrade initrd _really_ needs,
but things did not move forward until I fixed it up and added the
params that preupgrade was giving to the failing grubby.

 - And there I hit BZ#813973 - preupgrade (anaconda) garbles the URL
so you only get 404s.

The adventure continues, but at thistime I am under the impression
that preupgrade gets far less testing and polish than yum upgrades.




m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
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