[Novalug] Getting Fedora 11 to work -- Upgrading Fedora hosts difficult

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 03:54:35PM -0700, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> [ Making an on-list post, or otherwise I'm going to make a dozen-plus
> off-list posts. ]
> 
> Fedora does _not_ officially support distro version upgrades via YUM.
> I cannot stress this enough.  It is repeated over and over, even in the FAQs.
[...snip lots of relevant stuff...]

I recently upgraded a Fedora 10 box to 11 -- the one my wife and kids
use -- purely by following the instructions on the wiki.  I made it a
point not to apply any "special sauce" just because I personally knew
it might work better.  The procedure worked fine, and they are using
that box now without trouble.  The warnings basically mean that
despite a boatload of anecdotal evidence saying they work OK, Fedora
Project QA and release engineering folks don't necessarily have the
resources to provide the exponentially higher assurance around
upgrades that would be needed to bless them officially.

However, upgrading in place is a very important consideration, and I
suspect the "preupgrade" option is the one we'll likely be pursuing
for the long haul.  It tends to be (1) less intrusive from the UI side
(work while things are downloaded), and (2) supports custom yum repo
configurations wherever possible.

Remember we're talking about a platform that advances every six
months; anecdotes from 2004 are useless in predicting how things are
today.  That goes for plenty of other Linux distributions too, which
is why I try not to make sweeping generalizations about those I don't
use regularly.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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