update from 17 to 18 failed

[lee]

Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> writes:

> Am 11.06.2013 21:55, schrieb lee:
>>>> It seems so --- the question is why aren't such packages removed by yum
>>>> distro-sync?
>>>
>>> because it is not it's job to remove any package which is not
>>> found in the repos because you may have installed it manually
>>>
>>> it's job is to bring packages which are existing in the repos
>>> to the *exact* version in the repos no matter if this means
>>> downgrade ur upgrade them
>> 
>> Ah ok, that makes sense.  Which way is there to upgrade from one release
>> to the next when neither distro-sync, nor fedup can do this?
>
> i did dist-upgrade swith yum since Fedora 3 several hundret times
> even on a *lot* of production servers and "package-cleanup" is not
> that hard to hanlde

I just followed the recommended method using fedup, and it failed at
67%, leaving me with a mess.  I'm not too familiar yet with the package
management Fedora uses.

> no idea what is your problem to type "package-cleanup --leaves --all"
> and remove unused packages

That lists 353 packages.  The "problem" is:


+ I never trust computers, they do all kinds of weird and stupid stuff
    and sometimes the hardware fails, too.

+ I'm not very familiar with the package management Fedora uses.

+ There doesn't seem to be anything like aptitude Debian has that lets
    you view what packages there are, what is installed, etc..  I know
    there's some GUI gnome tool for that --- which, unfortunately,
    doesn't seem to even come close.  I'm not using gnome and I forgot
    how this tool is called.  It probably won't be helpful anyway.

+ After the upgrade failed, I could not make other assumptions about the
    status of the package management other than that it is probably in
    some sort of broken state.  This assumption was apparently right
    because the package management still seemed to figure it was Fedora
    17 while it was actually not.

+ I have no way to verify whether the package management is still in a
    broken state or not.

+ I have no way to verify whether my attempts to fix the mess the
    recommended upgrade process left me with were (sufficiently)
    successful.


> as well as "pckage-cleanup --orphans" shows you which can probably
> removed and if you not blindly say "yes" if there are deps you do not
> want to remove this is all really easy to handle twice a year

For all I know, the recommended upgrade process could have left me stuck
with an inoperational system, and I was only lucky that it didn't.  I
was also lucky that my attempts to fix the mess didn't seem to break
anything and didn't seem to make things worse.  Taking chances like that
twice a year is /not/ easy to handle.  It is out of the question, and
I'm not going to do it.  Reliability is required.

Looking at 353 packages and deciding whether to remove them or not may
be be more or less easy to handle.  I could make a perl script that
feeds the package names to yum one by one so that I can decide for each
of them to either remove it or not.  Then Fedora should update [1] and
add a statement that users of Fedora must be programmers.

That looking at 353 packages may be easy to handle doesn't mean that it
is something I would want to do twice a year --- or even once.  It is
something the package management should take care of, and it should at
least tell me whether a package is installed because I wanted it or
because the package management wanted it.  I'm pretty sure that I didn't
install all these 353 packages because I wanted them.  So why are they
installed?

For example, I know for sure that I never needed or wanted the package
"xorg-x11-drv-mga-1.6.2-6.fc18.x86_64", yet it is listed by
"package-cleanup --leaves --all".  Why is this package installed, and
since I didn't install it, why does it remain installed?

Can the package management answer such questions?  It should be able to
since it was used to install them, and it is supposed to know what the
dependencies are.  It should also know when a package was installed, and
it would be nice if it was possible to add a comment when installing or
removing a package so that I could tell myself why I installed or
removed something.  Provided I added such comments, the package
management could now tell me things like "you installed [package] on
[some date] because [my comment]" or "[package] was installed on [some
date] for dependencies when [package] was installed because [my
comment]".


[1]: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base

-- 
"Object-oriented programming languages aren't completely convinced that
you should be allowed to do anything with functions."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html