Various notes on /usr unification [LWN.net]

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 28, 2012 8:52 UTC (Tue) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
In reply to: Various notes on /usr unification by pj
Parent article: Various notes on /usr unification

pj wrote:
> A bit offtopic, but:
>> Fedora policy has always said that using the yum tool to update an installation to a newer release of the distribution is not supported; one is supposed to use a CD or the preupgrade tool for that purpose.

> ...is why I've run debian continuously since 1995 or thereabouts.
[...]
As a long-ish term Ubuntu user I am in the same situation (and since I don't tend to fiddle more than necessary it actually works for me). I'm interested to hear from someone in the other camp how much work it ends up being reinstalling your system on every release. I can't help thinking (warning, mild troll coming up) that it should be easy but is probably made difficult by the way that Linux systems and the software running on top of them aren't more cleanly separated in popular distributions.

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Upgrading

Posted Feb 28, 2012 14:20 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Note that you don't have to reinstall to get to a new release. Well, I guess RHEL doesn't support major release upgrades, but it's the exception. Fedora does upgrades just fine (modulo the occasional difficulty), but you're supposed to running anaconda from a separate root to do it in the supported way.

Upgrading

Posted Feb 28, 2012 21:55 UTC (Tue) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

And it's not like upgrading [K]Ubuntu was always a breeze... Almost every time I have to fix something - though I am probably no typical [Ubuntu] user either.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 29, 2012 5:01 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]

I have run RPM systems including Fedora for many years and have never used the install disk to upgrade. I have always used RPM (via Yum, up2date, URPMI, Red Carpet, SMART, or others). It has always gone well.

Well, I have run into package incompatibilities here and there. I would say that knowing how to 'temporarily' break the RPM database has probably been required a couple times along the way. For example, you might have to force the installation or removal of a package that is blocking other change. Or, a newer package might want to overwrite a file that still falls under the dominion of an older package.

My memory of when these have been required is a bit cloudy as I have also done dumb stuff like go from Fedora to RHEL or vice versa. I even went from Mandrake to Fedora once.

Other than a few Scientific Linux and CentOS machines I am mostly off RPM based systems these days though. Having to source from multiple (inevitably incompatible) RPM repositories has always caused more trouble for me than moving from version to version of the OS. I have found it necessary far less often to source foreign packages (or install unmanaged applications) when using Ubuntu or Debian.

I have run into similar issues converting an Ubuntu machine to Debian or back as well. The machine I am typing on was originally an Ubuntu machine, was migrated to Linux Mint, and is now Debian Unstable. The whole migration was nothing more than overwriting sources.list and using 'apt-get' each time.