Why can't I ugrade Fedora like Centos?

[steve]

On 11/07/2009 06:51 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>
> I upgraded from CentOS-5.3 to CentOS-5.4
> (and earlier from CentOS-5.2 to CentOS-5.3)
> just by running "yum update".
>
> Why can't I upgrade to Fedora-12 like that?
> Is it just that the CentOS makers are cleverer...?
>
While others have pointed out the similarity between upgrading fedora and 
upgrading CentOS releases (as opposed to upgrading CentOS point releases), allow 
me to defend fedora against the last comment that you made (maybe in jest, but 
just the same :))

a. The number of packages in Fedora are larger than in CentOS (I don't know 
absolute numbers but I'm willing to bet fedora has at least twice the number of 
packages as CentOS does). This implies that theoretically fedora has at least 
twice the number of possible points of failure during an upgrade -- of course 
with good packaging polices this is contained and one barely ever notices the 
differences between CentOS and Fedora upgrades.

b. One of the things Fedora aims for, is to include new technology and innovate 
as early as possible. This necessarily implies that some things might change 
drastically between releases. However, the effect of this too is contained by 
proper packaging policies.

c. Fedora is what Red Hat decides to base it's RHEL platform upon. RHEL is what 
CentOS distributes (after cleaning out the legal hassles to allow them to do so, 
for instance Red Hat trademarks). So, basically the 'cleverer' CentOS makers are 
building on top of the work of the Fedora makers, /including/ the tests and bugs 
coming out of the Fedora community as well as Red Hat's QA team.

d. RHEL (and so also CentOS) is designed to be run on production systems, so 
upgrades (using either yum upgrade or otherwise), undergo more rigorous testing 
compared to Fedora (which relies on people like us to test at least the beta 
releases and file bugs, if we expect upgrades to just work).

Hope that clarifies a few things about the cleverness of the Fedora 'community'. :)

cheers,
- steve

-- 
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