Yum update from Fedora 14 -> 15 WARNING!

[Mark Eggers]

On Tue, 31 May 2011 01:18:47 +0200, Christoph Wickert wrote:

> Am Montag, den 30.05.2011, 09:11 +0100 schrieb n2xssvv.g02gfr12930:
>> To anyone trying to upgrade from Fedora 14 to Fedora 15, DON'T EVEN
>> TRY!!!
> 
> After reading this thread I still don't know what exactly you did to
> upgrade your system. Can you please give us more details ? What commands
> did you run and what repos were enabled?
> 
> This is what I did yesterday:
> 
> # rpm -Uvh \
> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/
x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-15-1.noarch.rpm
> \
> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/
x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-rawhide-15-1.noarch.rpm
> # yum clean all
> # yum update yum
> # yum --releasever=15 distro-sync
> # reboot

See, that's my problem in all of this. I still have no clear idea how the 
original poster attempted to update from Fedora 14 to Fedora 15.

There seem to be at least two paths to do this (without a complete 
reinstall). The first is to use the preupgrade path. A link to this can 
be found here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpgrade

The second is the one outlined in the message above. Both have been 
reported to work well for various users.

What I would have liked to see from the original poster is the following:

Following the steps outlined in the PreUpgrade link, I did the following:

1. (command)
Expected results
Actual results

2. (command)
Expected results
Actual results

n. (command)
Expected results
Actual results (failure description)

Then, it would be nice to have seen the same sort of format followed for 
problem diagnosis and fix attempts.

The above (plus hardware particulars) would have given everyone a good 
chance to evaluate whether or not an upgrade or a fresh install is 
appropriate.

I've personally done some rather crazy things with preupgrade, including 
skipping versions. Outside of some pulse audio and font rendering issues, 
I've not been bit. The pulse audio problem was a bit difficult to fix, 
but now I have a working configuration (and the configuration files in 
version control). After playing around with a personal .fonts.conf, I've 
managed to get everything looking nice except for 12 point Courier in 
Emacs. 14 point Courier looks fine, so I'll live with that for now.

My real problem in moving from Fedora 14 to Fedora 15 stems from running 
the binary NVidia driver for an old 7600 GS card. According to numerous 
reports on the NVidia forums, this could result in lockups due to issues 
with xorg 1.10. Also, without patched Cairo libraries, themes that use 
gradients perform unusably slowly with the later NVidia drivers.

So I guess in order for me to upgrade, I have to answer the following 
questions:

1. Has Fedora patched the Xorg server to not do a recursive call to the 
underlying video drivers?

If not, then I will have to wait until NVidia fixes their drivers 
(again). An alternate solution is to downgrade to the last version of Xorg 
1.9.5 (if possible). I'm sorry that I cannot be more explicit here, but 
the details are scarce on the NVidia forums.

2. Has the gradient patch been removed from Cairo 1.10-3?

I know that the original plan was to do this for Fedora 15, but I could 
find no mention of it after glancing at the change logs. If so, then I'll 
have to either re-apply the patch for the gradients or wait until NVidia 
fixes their drivers (again).

These are the challenges I face in upgrading. If the original poster had 
been this explicit, I could have determined which of the following do to.

1. Back up and do a fresh install of Fedora 15
2. Use preupgrade to go from Fedora 14 to Fedora 15
3. Wait until my issues are answered, then move to Fedora 15
4. Skip Fedora 15 and wait until Fedora 16

However, the all-caps WARNING! just provides anecdotal information 
concerning one person's challenges. While I'm sympathetic to this 
person's frustrations, I have no idea whether these challenges are 
germane to my environment or not.

. . . . just my two cents.

/mde/