what has 'yum update' done?

lee lee at yun.yagibdah.de
Fri Jul 12 19:57:04 UTC 2013


"Eddie G. O'Connor Jr." <eoconnor25 at gmail.com> writes:

> On 07/12/2013 03:19 AM, Joe Zeff wrote:
>> On 07/11/2013 11:38 PM, Heinz Diehl wrote:
>>> Only speaking for myself: I always try to upgrade first, having a
>>> complete backup, of course. If it doesn't work, I reinstall. There's
>>> nothing to loose, since I'm expecting to reinstall anyway.
>>
>> I've had an update fail too, once.  Being retired and having both a
>> laptop and a desktop, I've always made sure my laptop gets upgraded
>> first and is working properly before upgrading my desktop.  It took
>> me several days of work, but I eventually had the satisfaction of
>> getting my desktop upgraded without a clean install.  Of course, if
>> I were in a production environment, I'd have bitten the bullet, done
>> a fresh install (/home is always on its on partition and wasn't
>> affected by the bad upgrade.)

When upgrading from 17 to 18, my data was affected in that restorecon
was going over it.

That leads to questions:  When I try to upgrade to 19, will my data be
touched?  What will happen when I disconnect the data disks before
upgrading and reconnect them after the upgrade has been done?  Will that
cause problems because selinux or whatever else needs to make changes?
How would I fix problems that may be due to this?


The upgrade process should tell the users what it is going to do and why
and ask them for permission before touching any of their data --- and
that includes customized configuration files.  When running restorecon
over the data, if there are any changes to make, the users should be
asked about them as well.

The upgrade from 17 to 18 silently broke apache because the
configuration had changed.  That is something that shouldn't happen, the
devs know when there are changes like that and make sure the users are
informed accordingly.

Where/how do you make suggestions like that?

> and started putting things back
>> together, because the work I did cleaning things up simply wouldn't
>> have been cost effective.  And, probably, if I were working and I
>> had this issue at home, I'd have ended up with a new install because
>> there's only so many hours per day and so much Copious Free Time to
>> spend cleaning up.  It's a trade-off.  For me, the time spent
>> getting things working were paid for in the satisfaction of a
>> difficult job well done.  Not everybody can afford to think that
>> way.

The question is what's easier: Try to fix problems or to redo all the
customizations.  I'm not at all prepared to redo them because it didn't
occur to me that it might necessary since you can upgrade --- at least
you should be able to upgrade.

> See?...it's stuff like the stories above that make me hesitant to go
> from 18 to 19....I mean can I backup my entier system andf install a
> frssh copy?....then put all my stuff back? Sure.

There's always the possibility that something goes wrong, so you always
want to make sure that your data is kept save.

> But isn't the whole purpose of an "upgrade' so that you can do just
> what it says.."upgrade" without fear of losing your valuable data or
> anything not working properly?

The purpose of an upgrade is to switch to more recent versions of the
installed software without having to start all over again from whatever
is the default when installing.  That doesn't exclude changes, like the
way apache is configured, which can lead to something not working ---
see above ...

> ...I can always just wait for F20 to come out and
> then move on from there....but I might have to ride the F18 wave a bit
> longer.....

And can you then upgrade from 18 to 20, skipping 19?


-- 
Fedora 18


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