yum upgrade paths

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Another topic I find interesting especially for servers is the yum 
upgrade path;

If you download the fedora-release package for Fedora N+1, along with 
it's dependency fedora-release-notes of course, and install it, you 
should find a large number of updates available to the system.

Needless to say, either a "yum update" or a "yum upgrade", even when 
just applied to specific packages only, should update the system to 
whatever packages Fedora N+1 has to offer. Long story short, you should 
end up with a Fedora N+1 system. The key word being "should".

Although this is not a very feasible way to upgrade servers (as it may 
interrupt services running on the system because of the replacement of 
binaries and libraries), I'm not stabbing at this for the concern of 
stability -as obviously when from your point of view you need stability 
what the he^H^H are you doing installing Fedora on the server.

Sometimes, like with Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 2 upgrades, you will 
find yourself behind to console to accompany the change to using udev; 
there's not much we can do about that.

Sometimes though, and this is where I get back to the actual point of 
this message, like with the upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9, as it 
turns out there's no upgrade path for essential packages like openssl; 
Here's why:

openssl on a Fedora 8 system has a newer NEVRA then the available 
package in Fedora 9+Updates. This causes yum and rpm to disregard the 
Fedora 9 openssl package as an update although in Fedora 8, openssl is 
the package that offers the libssl.so.6 library a lot of other packages 
depend upon. In Fedora 9, this library is called libssl.so.7. Needless 
to say, if the Fedora 9 version of the openssl packages does not end up 
on the to-be-upgraded system as an update or upgrade, a lot of packages 
depending on libssl.so.6 won't be upgraded, and the packages depending 
on libssl.so.7 won't be upgraded either.

Now, to put this into perspective, my servers at home run Fedora, both 
as a testing ground, because I need recent stuff to do stuff with and 
because I find the well-known derivatives a little boring.

Is the Server SIG interested in pursuing a package maintainer guideline 
that requires Fedora N+X should _always_ have newer NEVRA then Fedora N?

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip