Proposed F19 Feature: Fedora Upgrade - using yum

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 24, 2013, at 10:42 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.

My Scottish co-author and dear friend referred to such cases as "giving users razor blades, and telling them to go play on the freeway."

After 1/2 dozen fedup upgrades during testing, on average the downtime portion of the upgrade was between 25 and 40 minutes. On a five year old laptop, with 4GB of RAM, and WDC Scorpio Blue rust drive (the new computer with SSD did the fedup upgrade in less than 10 minutes). 

Meanwhile, a yum upgrade involves a transition from download to upgrade without notification, concomitant with the potential for arbitrary and untimely implosion that could hose the entire upgrade. And this is on a supposedly important computer that can't be down for 2 hours? Umm? I really don't understand this thread.

Chris Murphy