Where Fedora Went Wrong (nice conclusion)

[Les Mikesell]

Bruno Wolff III wrote:

>> After all, this crate is close to the bleeding edge, so a couple of
>> burps in the barrel during an upgrade can become a huge problem. It's
>> predictable, it computes and it happens. To then run off to complain
>> about a broken system which becomes magically "fixed" by a clean install
>> to another distro is just this side of lame. To know that the majority
>> of these users head to Ubuntu is enough to keep me here, where the
>> majority of the users left here are clearly clicking on all cylinders.
> 
> Except that doing clean installs is a real pain.

That's a problem that could be solved.  Not easily, but at least it 
makes an interesting problem...

 > One of the high priority
> future goals of Fedora should be to make upgrades work well. Besides
> making upgrading less work, this also mitigates concerns about the relatively
> short life span of Fedora versions.

But, making an in-place update work necessarily limits the changes that 
can be made between versions.  Suppose instead you require some extra 
space that you can use through the re-install (nfs/ftp/ssh, etc. would 
work, or a spare partition or USB drive) and store a list of packages 
plus all the user-modified data there, then make sure the current 
versions of the packages are installed in the new system and put the 
data back, modifying as necessary for the new packages.  It's not all 
that hard to do this by hand and it could probably be scripted to work 
at least as well as an in-place upgrade without the limitations.

As for Ubuntu - they haven't been through a 'hard' upgrade yet (like a 
major kernel rev difference) so I don't think you can compare their 
history yet.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com