what has 'yum update' done?

[lee]

"D. Hugh Redelmeier" <hugh at mimosa.com> writes:

> | From: lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de>
>
> | Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> writes:
> | 
> | > Am 07.07.2013 17:53, schrieb lee:
> | >> If Fedora cannot be updated without major problems, it's
> | >> not useable.
>
> Until you do it, you cannot know if you will have major problems.

That's true, and I'm hoping that there won't be problems.  Yet I think
it would unwise to ignore the indications I'm seeing that it might not
work.

> In my modest experience, I've not hit major problems.  Once you do,
> you might wish you'd done a backup.  Taking a backup and restoring it
> may well be more work that a fresh install.

Re-installing is not an option, and making a backup of the system itself
that is easy to restore isn't easy to do.  I'd have to buy yet another
disk for that.

> | When you look at the wiki, they are recommending to use fedup for
> | upgrades, and they are saying "Upgrading directly from one release to
> | the next using yum is not explicitly tested by Fedora QA"[1] and it
> | might work only by chance because of "packaging guidelines providing
> | detailed information on maintaining upgradability"[1].
>
> That's pretty convincing to me.  Why blaze a new path?  You can tell
> the pioneers by the arrows in their back.

Yeah, why?

> I do think that it is unfortunate that yum isn't a supported method.
> I'm all for reducing magic and making mechanisms understandable.
> Fedup is packaged magic (how much, I don't know: I haven't looked
> inside).

One advantage may be that the system which is updated does not need to
be the system currently running.  This way, all risk of putting the
running system needed to perform the upgrade into an unusable state is
eliminated.  I don't really know how it works, either; it seems they
might be using some sort of hybrid method.  I think it is --- or would
be --- a good idea to run an independent system, like booting from a
rescue CD, to perform the upgrade.

> | Considering that Fedora does not have a working (and tested and
> | supported) upgrade method at all
>
> I don't understand that claim.

Harald suggested that fedup to upgrade from F18 to F19 hasn't been
tested because F19 has just been released.  I don't know if that's true
or not.  I have seen fedup failing when trying to upgrade from F17 to
F18, and I have some indication that it will fail when I try to upgrade
from F18 to F19 because booting a vmlinuz-fedup which was secretly
foisted and hidden under the default booting entry in grubs menu now
named "Fedora" by running "yum update" failed.

Who knows, perhaps I have caught a virus that did that?

> fedup (mostly) works, is tested, and is supported.

I'm not convinced that it (mostly) works.

> And it is being used by a lot of other people, so they can help you.
> The scary part is that recovering from a failure isn't guaranteed to
> be easy and it isn't (as far as I remember) documented.

Exactly, there's only a list of a few know problems none of which are
likely to apply in my case.  I made a bug report about fedup being stuck
with the upgrade at 67% when trying to upgrade from 17 to 18, forcing me
to reboot, and there's no mention of it in that list.

What is one supposed to do when upgrading gets stuck?  The instructions
only tell you not to reboot during the upgrade: that's helpful ...

Like I said in another post, upgrading Fedora is all guesswork.

> | So we have three options to upgrade:
> | 
> | 1.) the recommended fedup which probably doesn't work
>
> It mostly does.

Wanna take a bet that it doesn't when I try it? :)

> | 2.) the untested and unsupported way using yum which might work or not
>
> Right
>
> | 3.) move away from Fedora and install a different distribution
>
> Surely that's harder than simpler re-installation.

Not really, the effort is the same.  I might have to learn about a
different package management and about some things that are done
differently, but that doesn't really matter.  In any case, I need to do
the customizations again, some of them depending on what the
distribution I'm going to install lets me start with.  In case of
Fedora, I don't exactly remember, but IIRC it doesn't even let you start
with a minimal system, which is really bad.

Switching to a distribution that can be upgraded is much easier than
re-installing one that can not.  Re-doing all the customization over and
over again is not the way to go.  I set up things once and forget about
them mostly, and if I have to come back some years later because I want
or need to make changes, it's usually easier than doing it the first
time because I have a pretty good memory.  In the meantime, things just
work and the distribution may have been upgraded 10 times already, who
cares.  I have better things to do than re-doing customizations and
configurations I have already done.

> | Only by examining the configuration of the boot manager I was able to
> | boot again.  That was just luck and I could have been left stranded with
> | a non-bootable system.
> | 
> | Such behaviour is unacceptable.  My question is:  What went wrong?  Or
> | was that even intended?
>
> I agree that having to understand the boot manager is cruel and
> unusual punishment.  It is unreasonable to ask users to do that.

Well, it depends on how you do it.  When you tell them nicely that
there's a boot manager and how important it can be and when you present
them with good documentation about how it works and how to use it, it's
not at all unreasonable to ask users to learn about it.

What is unreasonable (to say the least) is to secretly modify the
configuration of the boot manager in such a way that users are tricked
into booting something that may block their computer for hours, may
modify their software in unwanted ways, may cause them to lose data
and/or may leave them stranded with a non-working system.  Such is what
malware and viruses do.  Running "yum update" surely should never do
anything like that.


-- 
Fedora 18