another upgrade, another disaster

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-05-31 at 22:21 +0200, Caterpillar wrote:

> I would like to share my experience about upgrading from Fedora 16 to
> 17 a quiet number of machines.
> 
> 100% percenteage computer base have putted my hands on, had problems
> during the upgrade from Fedora 16 to 17.
> 
> Which problems? First of all, the most happening error (~80%) is after
> preupgrade-anaconda upgrade. Once the installation of fc17 packages
> has finished, at reboot, grub2 still had Fedora 16 kernels. To fix
> that you had to start one of those kernels (and conseguentely having a
> kernel panic when doing a system restart) and do a
> grub2-mkconfig /boot/grub2/grub.cfg On most cases, it fixed the
> problem, but not every single time. 

Yes. We know about that one. We've had it filed since before release.
Actually, there are at least two issues in this area. See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820340 ,
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820351 .

> Second bug I found out: during anaconda system upgrade, it freezed on
> upgrading package "steel bank common lisp". To finish the upgrade I
> had to reboot and let it start again.

It's a buggy %post script in the package.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=822008

> Third bug: after preupgrade finished to download fc17 packages, I
> rebooted, but grub did not have a “upgrade system” entry. So the
> computer is not upgradable with preupgrade.

Need more information.

> So now, developers say that they need more people to do beta testing,
> but my question is: if at least 80% userbase had troubles with grub
> showing old kernels, is it possible that nobody of testers had this
> problem? I really don't think so.

No, that is not the case. See above. The issues with old kernel sticking
around after upgrade were already known and reported before release. 

The #820351 case is fundamentally more or less impossible to solve
entirely, outside of sticking Epochs in the kernel package. So there was
no point holding up the release for that. The #820340 case is specific
to preupgrade and isn't a showstopper, so we didn't hold the release for
that one either. There is an upgrade currently in testing that ought to
fix it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net