Schedule for Wednesday's FESCo Meeting (2013-08-14)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 08/15/2013 04:36 PM, Paul Wouters wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Aug 2013, Reindl Harald wrote:
>
>> Am 15.08.2013 15:40, schrieb Paul Wouters:
>>> We can't tell people to re-install from scratch every 6 months.
>>> What we need is an "apt-get dist-upgrade" equivalent.
>>
>> *we have*
>>
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum
>>
>> i currently count 450 dist-upgrade this way and the oldest
>> setups are upgraded from Fedora 9 to Fedora 18 - the only
>> stupid is that instead spend more effort in the yum-upgrades
>> waste all the time with preupgrade/fedup and whatever the
>> next inkarnation is known
>
> I had tried preupgrade/fedup in the past, but it tried to stuff
> too many files in /boot because my root partition was encrypted,
> so this method was never usable for me. The wiki mentions that
> files now go into  /var/lib/fedora-upgrade  (which btw should really
> be /var/cache/fedora-upgrade) which is only available after asking
> for my disk encryption password.
>
> I'll try it for f18->f19, and if this got fixed that is a big step
> towards running fedora longterm across releases.

AFAIK, during an upgrade, fedup stores all required rpms below 
/var/cache/yum. This means, if you don't have a sufficiently large /var 
partition, you are likely to hit similar issues as with preupgrade.
Though this is less likely to hit users than storing packages under 
/boot, it's still possible to happen (it did happen to me).

Another issue I encountered with all 3 upgrade methods, was them not 
being able to compute required disk space sizes correctly, occasionally 
causing rpmdb corruptions (I did encounter this issue).

And yet another issue is the fedora-distribution occasionally carrying 
packages with greater NEVRs in older releases than in newer release.
A pretty nasty such case had been F18 been equipped with a newer kernel 
than F19 for a larger time frame.

Ralf