yum upgrade paths

[Jon Ciesla]

> 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?

As a LiveUpgradeSIG member http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/LiveUpgrade
and someone who also runs runs home servers on Fedora, I give this an
extremely emphatic +500.

> Kind regards,
>
> Jeroen van Meeuwen
> -kanarip
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