Proposed F19 Feature: Fedora Upgrade - using yum

[Mike Pinkerton]

On 26 Jan 2013, at 12:11, Chris Murphy wrote:

> 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.


Over the years, I have yum upgraded remote boxes from RHL 7.3 to F16.

On a remote yum upgrade, you can follow yum's progress -- see if it  
hangs, see any failure warnings, etc., fix what you can after it  
finishes -- then hold your breath when you reboot.  If the box isn't  
back online within 2 minutes, you know you have a major problem and  
contact the data center immediately.

If a fedup upgrade can go offline for a lengthy, but uncertain,  
amount of time, then the lack of feedback is worrying.  You can't  
hold your breath for 25 minutes, you don't know when to conclude that  
you have a serious problem that will require help from the data  
center staff, and you don't have any idea where the process went off- 
track.

If you could SSH into fedup during its "offline" period and get real  
time feedback about what it is doing and any errors it encounters,  
and perhaps the ability to fix any problems when it finishes but  
before it attempts to reboot, then it would be less scary for remote  
upgrades.

-- 
Mike