what has 'yum update' done?

[lee]

Mateusz Marzantowicz <mmarzantowicz at osdf.com.pl> writes:

> If you don't want to upgrade to F19 yet, try to regenerate grub boot
> menu manually using grub2-mkconfig. You'll gain some time to track
> package that is trying to make you "happy" and then remove or
> reconfigure it.

You mean messing up booting when running 'yum update' has been
intentional?

> For upgrading use fedup (I did it and had no major issues), but do
> install it and run when you're ready and have all valuable data backed up.

So now one person says "use yum" and another says "use fedup".

I can tell you what happened last time with fedup: I followed the
instructions on the wiki to install it and to upgrade.  What was
installed later turned out to be an outdated version of fedup that has a
bug which was already fixed, preventing users from running it again.  It
stopped upgrading at 67% and I had to reboot, and it left a mess of
packages installed from both F17 and F18.  I had to fix the bug myself
and running fedup again didn't fix the mess, which then I had to fix
manually, with a very good change of being left stranded with a
non-working system while trying to fix it.

Now when involuntarily booting vmlinuz-fedup when the booting was messed
up after yum update, booting stopped at some early stage.

Do you really think fedup will suddenly magically work when I actually
try to upgrade?

Besides, upgrading will require to have an installer for a different
distribution at hand so I can install something else when Fedora isn't
upgradable again.  It also requires to disconnect the disks that hold my
data to be sure that it doesn't get messed up during the upgrade or when
installing a different distribution.

Now consider the possible consequences of running a presumably pretty
harmless "yum update":  You can be left stranded with a non-working
system and you can lose your data.  What kind of reliability is that?

It's not feasible to disconnect the data disks every time when running
"yum update" or when using yum to install a package you find you need
because it might screw up something again.  What do the makers of Fedora
suggest how to deal with this problem?


-- 
Fedora 18