Interview: Fedora developers Seth Vidal and Will Woods (Red Hat Magazine) [LWN.net]

Interview: Fedora developers Seth Vidal and Will Woods (Red Hat Magazine)

Posted Apr 16, 2008 5:56 UTC (Wed) by djabsolut (guest, #12799)
Parent article: Interview: Fedora developers Seth Vidal and Will Woods (Red Hat Magazine)

Anaconda has the advantage of running outside of the system it is upgrading.

During an upgrade from FC5->FC7, I've had the pleasure of the installer deleting the contents of /home , even though I explicitly told it not to touch it. I like Fedora, but this experience suggests that the risk of doing a live yum upgrade is lower.

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Interview: Fedora developers Seth Vidal and Will Woods (Red Hat Magazine)

Posted Apr 16, 2008 8:14 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

“even though I explicitly told it not to touch it.”

I'm intrigued, after many years of upgrading Red Hat and then RHEL, CentOS and Fedora systems,
I've never seen any option to ask the Anaconda _upgrade_ process "explicitly" not to touch
anything. Where is this option?

Interview: Fedora developers Seth Vidal and Will Woods (Red Hat Magazine)

Posted Apr 17, 2008 1:52 UTC (Thu) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link]

If I remember correctly, the installer had/has an option to format partitions. My setup had "/" and "/home" as separate partitions. I allowed it to do what it liked with "/", but not with "/home" -- it went ahead and formatted "/home" anyway.

Interview: Fedora developers Seth Vidal and Will Woods (Red Hat Magazine)

Posted Apr 17, 2008 6:12 UTC (Thu) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link]

That's interesting - I've been doing similar upgrades since fc3 (!) and have never had that
occur. That's not to say I blindly trust anaconda, I still make backups of $HOME!

Interview: Fedora developers Seth Vidal and Will Woods (Red Hat Magazine)

Posted Apr 17, 2008 14:41 UTC (Thu) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link]

Here's a trick I've used when upgrading (from memory): Download the DVD iso image to my /home
partition. Burn the first install CD, boot from it, and at the boot prompt, use "linux
askmethod". Choose to install from hard drive. Give it the path to where the DVD iso resides.

Since Anaconda pulls the ISO from the /home partition, it will refuse to modify that
partition, even if I make a mistake in my partitioning choices.

Another benefit is that installing from an ISO image is much faster than installing from CD or
DVD.

Works-for-me

Posted Apr 16, 2008 14:36 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216) [Link]

Sorry about your experience, but I've done lots of Fedora upgrades, and they worked for me (no /home erasures).

I also like Fedora. Ubuntu is a good competitor, but I believe Fedora is FAR more secure at this time. In particular, Fedora bakes-in a lot of countermeasures to combat unknown vulnerabilities, like SELinux with targeted policies and a long list of buffer overflow countermeasures. Hopefully Ubuntu will adopt more of Fedora's security mechanisms for countering unknown vulnerabilities, just as Fedora is adopting some Ubuntu components like Upstart.

I really like the pre-upgrade approach to be in Fedora 9! It enables easy network updates (getting rid of the "create media" step), yet I think it's a much safer way to do major changes to the system compared to Debian-based systems (because you're not running the system while making the radical change). At least technically it looks like the best of all worlds. (If it works well, other distros could easily copy it.)

Vive le competition!

Works-for-me

Posted Apr 16, 2008 21:09 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I prefer live updating. Among other things it helps us people use the testing distribution and upgrade it daily, so breakage gets quickly detected. Actually I have seen a few regressions, but it has been years since the last broken package for me, and this is using the testing distro.

Maybe it is not so safe as updating from a live CD, and maybe this might make a nice alternative option for updating Debian stable.