A Fedora User For the Long Haul [LWN.net]

A Fedora User For the Long Haul

Posted Oct 26, 2006 21:40 UTC (Thu) by at2000 (guest, #20920)
In reply to: A Fedora User For the Long Haul by Pc5Y9sbv
Parent article: An empty legacy

I sort of dislike this altitude of the RedHat camp. My oldest debian/ubuntu linux was installed around 6 years ago and has survived for 6 upgrades now (potato -> woody -> sarge -> hoary -> breezy -> dapper -> edgy). Other systems are also upgraded twice or so like this. To me, upgrades never fail, and more importantly, it has near zero downtime.

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A Fedora User For the Long Haul

Posted Oct 27, 2006 3:48 UTC (Fri) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328) [Link]

Which attitude is that? I am saying the upgrade DID work, and would have had near zero downtime if I hadn't tried to do it to a system that was 98% full when I started.

This was a completely remote, network based upgrade by pointing yum at a mirror site, installing the new fedora-release package, running "yum upgrade", and then rebooting with the new kernel at the end. I did this via ssh... My extra grief was clearing some space and running "yum upgrade" again in the middle, following by a search through all packages sorted by install time to find a few orphans to delete.

My attitude about not trusting upgrades predates RedHat, and comes from my experience with Slackware, SLS, and older non-Linux environments...

Also, the problem with the oom-killer storms was reported also by Ubuntu and Debian users when I did a web search. It seems to be a very erratic bug, not tied to any particular distribution or kernel version.

Ubuntu is not free from troubles either

Posted Oct 29, 2006 14:50 UTC (Sun) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]

I am disappointed that some people, like you, feel the need to polarize the community. All distributions have problems with supporting seamless upgrades between releases. It may have worked in your case, but that doesn't mean that it works for everybody. (Just like if it breaks for one person it doesn't fail for all users).

The irony is that on slashdot the following article appeared:

Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare"
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/06/10/28/239258.shtml

So it's not an isolated problem with Fedora. Fact is that it is easy to do reinstallations to test a products consistency, but it is much harder to test upgrades and reiterate over the same upgrade (for all the different systems that exist). Once a system is upgraded (with all its problems) you loose the original system to debug and fix it.

An Enterprise Linux distribution is what you need if you want to be free of upgrade problems. Long support and non-disruptive changes is what 99.99% of the people need. Go with CentOS or Ubuntu LTS instead.

Stop polarizing the community and take a step back. Red Hat is improving Ubuntu indirectly, and vice versa. Killing diversity is killing the community.