importance of upgradeability

[lee]

Fernando Lozano <fernando at lozano.eti.br> writes:

> Hi,
>
>>>>> In my case, I found Fedora very expensive to upgrade.
>>>> That I can understand --- upgrading twice a year, especially when
>>>> it's questionable if the upgrade works --- can be painful, all the more
>>>> when you have many machines to upgrade.  It gave me a lot to worry about
>>>> even with only one.
> If it helps, I upgraded a number of systems from F17 straight to F18
> without a problem (except for a little packaging bug in openjdk). Some
> of those systems included packages from external repos like rpmforge. So
> you could upgrade once a year instead of twice.

It seems to work fine now, and I like to have recent NVIDIA drivers.  I
don't mind upgrading twice a year when it works, and it might have the
advantage that per each upgrade, not as many changes are introduced as
when upgrading less frequently.

I've been running Debian Testing for a very long time.  Since it was
always up to date, you never needed to upgrade.

> Upgrades from the network take a long time. It would help if we could
> point to a local DVD install media and use the updates repo at the same
> time, so fedup don't take so long downloading packages.

One way or another, you need to download, which takes a while.  Then all
the packages need to be upgraded, and that also takes a while.  While
you run fedup to prepare for the upgrade, you can do other things just
as if you were downloading a DVD image.

> Better yet, it could be possible to make a local mirror of the updates
> repo (rsync?) and point fedup to it. This local mirror could act as a
> "cache", with fedup checking if their packages are the latest and
> downloading from the net if not.

That would make a lot of sense when you need to upgrade several machines
--- I guess it's somehow possible.  It probably has been "automated" in
that it would only download and cache the packages that are actually
needed since you probably do not need the whole repo with all available
packages.


-- 
Fedora release 19 (Schrödinger’s Cat)