[Test-Announce] PSA: Use fedup 0.8 for upgrades to Fedora 20! (was Re: Should a working fedup in Fedora N's stable repository be a release criterion for N+1?)

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2013-12-17 at 21:47 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-12-17 at 15:16 -0800, Andrew Lutomirski wrote:
> > I have a tendency to upgrade to a new Fedora release as soon as it's
> > final, and I sometimes upgrade even sooner.  ISTM that the official
> > upgrade process is almost always broken, often for known reasons.
> > Should one of the criteria for releasing Fedora N+1 be that a
> > fully-updated Fedora N must be able to successfully complete 'fedup'
> > or whatever the current preferred upgrade program is?
> > 
> > (FWIW, the current bug is particularly nasty -- fedup 0.7.0 apparently
> > can't actually update anything, and the sequence:
> > 
> >  - Install fedup 0.7.0
> >  - Try it and watch it fail or hang
> >  - Update to fedup 0.8.0 from updates-testing
> >  - Run fedup
> > 
> > ends up downloading all rpms *twice* a sucking up a correspondingly
> > immense amount of disk space.
> 
> Um, I'm fairly sure it doesn't. It only re-downloads stuff that's
> different from the previous run.
> 
> We did test upgrades to F20 with 0.7, and they did work in testing, and
> quite a lot of people reported success with fedup in the last two weeks
> when at least some of them likely used 0.7.
> 
> You have to bear in mind it's release day today, and there's always
> weirdness on release day, and people who have success generally don't
> report it while those who hit failure almost always do. I've been
> advising people to upgrade to 0.8 and retry just as a kind of generic
> piece of advice; for many of them, it'd probably work if they just
> retried with 0.7. 0.8 does fix several bugs compared to 0.7, but 0.7
> wasn't entirely broken.

Eh, that'll teach me to talk before thoroughly testing: these words are
delicious! Om nom nom.

I just poked it a bit and it sure seems like upgrades with fedup 0.7 to
F20 are busted. They definitely worked when we tested shortly before
release, though. I can only think that using fedup 0.7 against upgrade
kernel/image built with fedup-dracut 0.8 doesn't work.

FranciscoD also points out that the location of files downloaded by
fedup changed between 0.7 and 0.8, so if you do a run with 0.7 then try
with 0.8, it'll re-download all the updates, which is a waste of space
and bandwidth.

So, here's the news: do your upgrades to F20 with fedup 0.8, yo. It's in
updates-testing for F18 and F19 at present, but will go to stable for
F19 tomorrow. If you're upgrading from F18, you'll need to pass
'--nogpgcheck' to fedup, because of
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1040689 .

If you did an unsuccessful run with fedup 0.7, then you can do:

mv /var/tmp/fedora-upgrade /var/tmp/system-upgrade
mv /var/lib/fedora-upgrade /var/lib/system-upgrade

before running fedup 0.8, to save it downloading all the packages again,
and make sure it cleans up nicely when it's done. I've just tested this,
and it works.

If you've already done an unsuccessful run with fedup 0.7 and then a
successful run with 0.8, you may have files from the 0.7 run hanging
around in /var/lib/fedora-upgrade and /var/tmp/fedora-upgrade. It is
entirely safe and, indeed, advised to rm -rf these directories.

Sorry for the mess, folks!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

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