Clean Installs are Remarkable

[Joel Rees]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 22.12.2011 20:29, mike cloaked wrote:
>> Of course others may largely have had no problems with ugrades and
>> maybe I was just the one unlucky one!  Anyway with all the QA testing
>> on recent versions as well as the QA testing of the upgrade path
>> perhaps my experience of it is simply outdated.
>
> i made some hundret dist-upgrades since 2006 with yum
> yes they are sometimes not "start and forget" but it takes
> me 1-3 days after a fresh-install (many services, customized
> configs) and so i prepare dist-upgrades on ONE virtual machine

How long does it take to prepare that first one?

Preupgrade took me about 44 hours, F14 to F15. Yum upgrade would have
been about the same, according to my past experiences.

> there are important packages rebuilt from source with removed
> restart of services due update, newer versions than fedora for
> many reasons and after the preparing each dist-upgrade on the
> other servers takes 5-7 minutes while all services are running
> and 20-30 seconds for the reboot

But I'm sure you didn't have 3,450 packages in you virtual machines.

> i see no reason to go the windows "install from scratch" way
> on a linux system since you can check all things before reboot
> and yes you are responsible to do this as admin
>
> maybe on simple-minded machines with no customizations a fresh
> install is the faster way, but soch browse-only and "eat what i
> get" setups do not interest me in any way

I generally don't do install from DVD because there will always be the
first yum update after the install, to kill a bit of time. I use the
netinstall image to get fresh installs. That way, the packages are
fresh when the install ends. Also, I tend to start out with a lot
fewer packages on the fresh install, bring my /etc tweaks and such
back, and bring the other packages back as I need them.

Just different ways of doing things.

But I do wish the upgrade weren't so much of a chasm to cross every
six months. Also wish my laptop hadn't died. Upgrades hurt less when
you still have a machine to work from.