Proposed F19 Feature: Fedora Upgrade - using yum

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2013-01-23 at 18:04 +0000, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:

> If this method will be tested by FedoraQA, then I believe this upgrade method 
> can be safely recommended to user. 

On a practical level, this is not a good thing to rely on. It is
impossible for QA to cover the entire set of possible upgrades, or even
an appreciable fraction of it.

The upgrade testing we do can reliably expose major problems with the
upgrade mechanism itself, and - mostly - major problems in core and
commonly-used package scripts. It can never be relied upon to expose
anything beyond that; and any scenarios in which 'FedoraUpgrade' would
produce a worse result than fedup are likely to fall into this set.
Thus, QA testing of 'FedoraUpgrade' would not be a reasonable foundation
on which to build an assertion that it is a safe upgrade method, worthy
of recommendation to end users. 

Several knowledgeable developers have asserted that - while it often
happens to work out okay - online upgrading is an inherently dangerous
operation, I don't see that the limited amount of validation QA is able
to offer can possibly gainsay them.

Personally, I'd agree with several other responders that yum upgrade
should stay in its current status: we document it but discourage it.

(As a side note, I would like to avoid describing fedup as 'officially
supported' and describe it instead as 'officially recommended' - it's an
important semantic difference, I think.)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net