Proposed F19 Feature: Fedora Upgrade - using yum

Simo Sorce simo at redhat.com
Fri Jan 25 19:23:31 UTC 2013


On Fri, 2013-01-25 at 19:20 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Fri, 25.01.13 08:58, Simo Sorce (simo at redhat.com) wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2013-01-25 at 05:42 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 11:46:24PM -0500, Simo Sorce wrote:
> > > 
> > > > We are all grown up enough to decide for our own, just give the
> > > > information and let the admin take care of that.
> > > 
> > > Well, that's the problem. Most of our users (including many of the 
> > > professional sysadmins) are *not* able to make a fully informed choice 
> > > about whether an online upgrade will ensure that they're no longer 
> > > running any code with known security issues. That's not a criticism of 
> > > them - it's just a much harder problem than almost everyone realises.
> > > 
> > > Nobody's suggesting making it impossible to use yum, but blessing it as 
> > > a first-class distribution upgrade mechanism is a bad idea. There's far 
> > > too many corner cases, and we can't justify the effort it'd take to fix 
> > > all of them.
> > 
> > Nonsense, for a distribution upgrade you just recommend the admin to
> > reboot the system when done.
> > Everybody expects to reboot after a big distro-sync anyway as there is a
> > new kernel and basically new-everything.
> 
> Ah, so you have to reboot anyway, so where is the difference between
> your approach and proper offline updates then? Either way you have to
> interrupt your work to reboot the machine. One just takes a slight bit
> longer for rebooting...


A) One single reboot you do after not upfront.

If you are on a server logged in via ssh you can often keep doing some
work while most of the system is being updated and you can more easily
remote updates.

B) I will *not* trust an update system that cuts me out of my remote
server and make me *hope* it will come up later. If yum freaks out for
*whatever* reason I want to be there with an emergency shell open via
ssh to try to recover the system. Not have to call the colocation and
figure out what happened from possibly missing logs *if the system boots
at all*.

I've been saved more than once by a shell open during changes in the
configuration or upgrades, that is non-negotiable to me.

C) Not all updates require immediate reboot.
If I am updating the kernel and some minor package, I can as well decide
to reboot at the end of the day, rarely the update is so critical I have
to reboot NOW!

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York



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