Fedora Horror 6 announce [LWN.net]

Fedora Horror 6 announce

Posted Oct 25, 2006 6:49 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Fedora Horror 6 announce by JoeBuck
Parent article: Fedora Core 6 released

From my experience on Ubuntu, it doesn't save bandwidth if you're going from release to release: pretty much every package is updated so you're in effect downloading the whole CD. (If you have a "minimal" install rather than the usual desktop install, of course, it does save bandwidth. Also, Ubuntu is one single CD, you'll anyway need to go to the net for packages not included there.)

But I agree, dist-upgrade (or ubuntu's update-manager, which basically does the same thing more carefully) is the best solution for people connected to the net. Why doesn't Fedora do that -- is yum not good enough? I have no experience with yum; I have nightmare memories of rpm in pre-yum days, after trying Debian I never went back.

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apt-get upgrade 'Fedora testing'

Posted Oct 25, 2006 8:19 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> is yum not good enough?

Technically it's entirely capable of the task, but 9/10 of the
job is not done by the tool but by the management of the repository.
If the quality testing of the packages doesn't include testing a
full 'upgrade' from one release of the distribution to the next
in a variety of installations, then there's no guarantee that it
will work well for you.

Debian has had a long history of making sure everything works
nicely with apt; upgrading and even downgrading between the
'stable', 'testing' and 'unstable' repositories (which are
effectively different releases of the distribution) is very
well tested: if a new version of a package breaks apt-get,
it doesn't make it from 'unstable' to 'testing'.

Fedora doesn't seem to maintain a 'testing' repository that
lets you back off again ... yum only gets to hear about
security updates or a whole new release.

apt-get upgrade 'Fedora testing'

Posted Oct 25, 2006 9:25 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Fedora has a updates-testing repository where updates are usually pushed through (with some exceptions like critical security updates). There is also a regular check on potential update issues done automatically against the repositories

For example,

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2006-O...

There is room for improvement however

that's another problem answered

Posted Oct 25, 2006 11:06 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

The issue arosen wasn't about update path (although it's very important, but during a release lifecycle) but about changing releases to stay with updates.

Actually I see three grave bugs in Red Hat approach since 4.x which are largely connected:

- "full install" (which sucks big time in terms of resulting sysadmin culture, not to mention non-optimal and undersecured systems)
- "reinstall" (which is a waste of time and effort, much like windows administering the same way)
- "big chunked packages" which ruin any effort for finer-grained and more competent package dependencies.

Yep, all of these do work but any of these has done as much harm to youngsters as Slackware in 21th century I guess. Even if the latter works too.

/me waves a banner and shouts "Fedora, learn from Debian!" [we've already done so] :-)

that's another problem answered

Posted Oct 25, 2006 12:56 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Have you actually used Fedora anytime recently? If not you might want to check the current status again.

* There is no "install everything" option anymore. So if you want a full installation, you have to click the groups explicitly or use kickstart.

* You dont have to reinstall. Upgrading from one release to another has been support by the installer.

* Dependencies are much more granular now. If there are specific packages which could be split up further, file bug reports.

installer upgrade == physical presence + downtime

Posted Oct 25, 2006 20:27 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

> Have you actually used Fedora anytime recently? If not
Exactly the case. I'm quite happy to manage to avoid it, frankly -- colleagues have had *serious* troubles with FC5 deployment even if they do have RH/CentOS/Fedora experience for years (one of our managers, who is rather non-technical but fond of Fedora, insisted on that). Maybe there will be some bugreports, maybe just a Russian-language summary (if the latter, I'll try to pass that to those descendant projects of Fedora where people speak Russian, there are several).

Still, besides "using", there's "peeking into" or "watching over the shoulder" to catch interesting ideas and implementations or notice gotchas to try and avoid.

Not that it's particularly easy to fix e.g. "spaces instead of Cyrillics on printouts from mozilla on a postscript printer"... just that in our distro, it was fixed in 2001, and at least FC4 still had this.

> There is no "install everything"
Good. Seems like Fedora has finally outgrown that... that... oh well. Of RedHat.

> You dont have to reinstall.
I know. Seems like those who wrote the nice humorous announce -- remember the announce? -- aren't like promoting sane upgrade methods like "use yum luke" though. Or at least half-hearted methods like "use installer to *upgrade*".

> Upgrading from one release to another has been support by the installer.
I apologise but I have sort of experience like moving off RH7.3 to more proper server distro (in that case, ALT Linux Master 2.2) online, with physical access to the system but a few minutes of downtime available and almost requirement that at least xinetd portforwarding *is* alive and rather uninterrupted.

So, um, I think I don't need the installer scaffolding utterly if I would need online upgrade of RH/FC system. I could manage -- if the package base is principally manageable -- that with only /bin/rpm, /dev/head and probably a piece of /proc/paper.

It's only that I (notice the overall subjectivity of this message, it doesn't pretend to be objective) prefer sane tools to do sane things and not the insanity of using **installer** to do an **offline** upgrade between sequential versions of the same distro when I've been doing **online** upgrades for years. Yep, with different distro, the same we're using for the more successful deployments.

> Dependencies are much more granular now.
Hope the dependency graph isn't the result of much hackery either. We've been busy with fixing up deps after going more granular since ca. 2001, and it took at least two years for the dust to settle.

> If there are specific packages which could be split up further, file bug reports.
Thanks sir, so far I prefer to maintain some 120+ packages in Another Distro.

Again, this is not to make Fedora devs feel down, much (not everything) of what they do is very good and appreciated. It's a (intentionally rough) side note from a person who started with RH clone (WGS Linux Pro, if anyone remembers), then sat on RH5.1 for a short time, then another (local) RH clone for a year or so, and then ALT Linux -- because it felt better than Debian which was actually the primary target to move to off RH clones when it was finally enough...