Upgrading section of Installation Guide

[Adam Williamson]

(pjones, there's a paragraph about bootloader stuff in the middle of
this mail which could use your input - skip straight to that :>)

Hi, folks. Just looking over the Upgrading section of the F20 install
guide as part of my hurried project to try and co-ordinate our fedup
messaging...

I believe these parts:

"Some upgraded packages may require the installation of other packages
for proper operation. If you choose to customize your packages to
upgrade, you may be required to resolve dependency problems. Otherwise,
the upgrade procedure takes care of these dependencies, but it may need
to install additional packages which are not on your system.

Depending on how you have partitioned your system, the upgrade program
may prompt you to add an additional swap file. If the upgrade program
does not detect a swap file that equals twice your RAM, it asks you if
you would like to add a new swap file. If your system does not have a
lot of RAM (less than 256 MB), it is recommended that you add this swap
file."

from
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/ch-upgrade-x86.html are old holdovers from preupgrade and no longer applicable or relevant; I think they should simply be removed.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/ch18s02.html :

The --debuglog stuff seems kind of extraneous, since you never explain
to people what it's for or what to do with the log. I'd either add a
note about what this does and why they might want to look at the log
etc, or just drop that parameter from the instructions.

The stuff about updating the bootloader on UEFI is specific to the
Fedora XX->Fedora 18 transition where grub2-efi was introduced. F17 and
earlier are now EOL and we do not really support upgrades from EOL
releases. I would suggest we simplify this section and basically write
it considering only upgrades from 18 or 19, at least in the main body. I
don't _believe_ we have made any changes to the efibootmgr stuff between
F18 and F20, or that it is necessary to 'refresh' the grub2
configuration - I think UEFI upgrades at least between F18 and F20
should not require or even recommend any form of manual intervention
with grub; it should all be in order after a fedup. pjones, can you
correct me if I forgot anything? (I need to check how this works out in
the real world, for sanity - had a couple of reports this morning of
UEFI fedup not working properly at all, but the _theory_ is what should
be reflected in the installation guide text, I guess).

So, I'd recommend replacing "This is not mandatory, but is recommended
for BIOS systems and strongly recommended for EFI systems." with "This
is not necessary for UEFI systems. It is not mandatory, but is
recommended, for BIOS systems."

and then dropping everything from "To update GRUB on EFI systems..." to
"After the next reboot, your system will be using grub2-efi."

The 'fedup can only upgrade from Fedora 17 and above' note is also now
fairly EOL-y. The "If the contents of your /etc/fedora-release" note is
I believe a holdover from anaconda-based upgrades and can be removed.

We could add a little 'EOL upgrades' section at the bottom, perhaps,
which explains that EOL upgrades are not supported but you can try if
you're adventurous enough, and maybe suggest reading the installation
guides for the relevant Fedora releases to find specific instructions
like bootloader migration?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net