upgrading from F7 to F8

[Roberto Ragusa]

Mark W. Jeanmougin wrote:
> FYI: I'm having the 26% - 28% problem during the dependency check.
> I've seen it on a x86_64 and on i386 hardware.
> 
> And, I've seen it while upgrading from Fedora 7 or Fedora Core 6.
> 
> This is using the DVD.
> 
> I know I'm not offering any solutions in this email, but I wanted to
> add two more data points of failure.

Another data point (with something you could even call a solution).

It happened to me: got to 25-26% in about one minute than sit
there for more than an hour, with strace showing a probable
infinite dependency loop).

- F7->F8 on i386 hardware
- tried both via DVD and HTTP (of copied DVD content)
- tried both graphical and textual

The DVD is missing a lot of stuff that is installed on my system
(e.g. Thunderbird).
I suppose the upgrade would have upgraded the "basic" packages
and left the rest to yum; or maybe it assumes an Internet
connection and tries to download the packages?

Anyway, I managed to upgrade the system with the yum
method: rpm -Uhv fedora-release and than yum upgrade
(extra tricks with wget and --downloaddir option of yum to
avoid the slow downloading speed of yum on many small
packages).

But I removed a few problematic packages from other
repositories and reinstalled them after upgrading.

At the end, the upgrade finished successfully.
Initially many apps refused to start (firefox!) and I had
some crazy system freezes; then I found that the problem was
related to the xfs server, which was not started and which
easily died after manual starting.
The xorg conf was still containing the unix:/7100 line,
I had to remove it manually.
I also fixed a couple of probably incorrect links in
fontpath.d (the ":unscaled" part was included in the
link destination and so the link was not going to the
correct directories).

I don't know if the xorg conf problems are related to
the yum method, maybe anaconda would have fixed that part
itself.

The system is now OK. Hibernation also works, but I'm going
to replace the kernel with the tuxonice one from atrpms.
Tuxonice (formerly suspend2) is faster and proved
itself very reliable for me; I have been using suspend2
for a couple of years with great results. Upgrading to F8
interrupted more than 30 days of hibernating/resuming twice
a day.
(I'm actually forgetting how the boot process looks like :-) )

I have to add that this F7->F8 upgrade has been by far the
most difficult in my Redhat/Fedora history, which started on
RedHat 5.1 (5.1, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3,
8.0, 9, fc1, fc2, fc3, fc4, fc5, fc6, f7, f8).

It was actually the first time I had to restore the entire
system from a backup (yes, I backup before upgrading).
While the yum upgrade was in progress (1600 packages to be
updated), the stupid weekly cron "rpm -q" script started
and managed to lock yum at 600 packages done, 1000 to go,
in a way I think it's not solveable (waiting on a futex).
I did not even try to fix a system where 600 packages
were duplicated (f7 and f8 both installed, as the rpm cleanup
is only done by yum at the end).

Sorry, this mail grew bigger than expected.

Best regards.

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it