A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

[Posted December 18, 2013 by corbet]

Discussions on the Fedora mailing lists have made it clear that attempting to upgrade a machine to Fedora 20 with fedup 0.7 will end badly. The solution is simple enough: update fedup to version 0.8 before doing the upgrade; those upgrading from Fedora 18 should also pass the --nogpgcheck flag to fedup.

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Posted Dec 18, 2013 15:45 UTC (Wed) by luto (subscriber, #39314) [Link]

Instead of using --nogpgcheck, you could also manually import the Fedora 20 keys using rpmkeys.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 16:26 UTC (Wed) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

Thank you, Jon! It's one of the stories that make LWN worth the subscription cost!

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 17:16 UTC (Wed) by rriggs (subscriber, #11598) [Link]

Changing the location that fedup stores its Fedora packages on the local system seems like an arbitrary and unnecessary change.

Here's the commit: https://github.com/wgwoods/fedup/commit/3494c41e000c1eaea...

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 17:46 UTC (Wed) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

It's actually nice to Fedora-based distributions. They would have less work to do on rebranding, so they could concentrate on the essential changes.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 18:15 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Yes, typically branding is confined to a few specific easily replaced packages in Fedora so that Fedora remixes can focus on other changes. It helps downstreams like RHEL and CentOS too. The timing of the change however has been very unfortunate.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 17:52 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I realise it's too late to do anything about fedup 0.7, but can't it be ensured that future upgrades will fail if the fedup version isn't advanced enough? Eg, Ubuntu's upgrade manager upgrades itself if necessary before doing anything else, and has done so for years.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 17:59 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

does it pick up a new update from a testing repository? Because that is what was needed to fix the problem here.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 18:05 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

No, the system should be upgradable with the stable version. Otherwise the upgrade should not be released.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 18:10 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

If you read the mail, you would have noticed that it did work when QA tested it. It is a release blocker if the problem had been noticed before release.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 0:44 UTC (Thu) by torquay (guest, #92428) [Link]

It is a release blocker if the problem had been noticed before release.

Obviously the QA failed here. The question we should be asking is what process (or lack thereof) led to this failure. Is it too many changes at the very last minute? Is it insufficient test coverage?

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 7:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

This is in fact the entire purpose of the thread linked by lwn

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 2:37 UTC (Thu) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link]

Well obviously it was not tested enough. How else could you explain it?

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 2:53 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Read the thread. It is very well explained

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 18:06 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

ps -- but that is not necessary. Failure with an informative error message would be enough.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 6:00 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

It's also a failure in the design of fedup. Obviously too-old versions of fedup will be run against a distribution's release repository. The release repo (or better still the release repo's update repo) should have a file identifying the acceptable versions of fedup which can apply the release repo. Fedup can fetch that, check it, and abandon or proceed.

That would give an easy way for a distro to go "oh no, don't use fedup version $BLAH to update to distribution version $WHATEVER. Much better than listing the issue in some release notes.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 6:07 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Bugs and suggestions can be reported via http://bugz.fedoraproject.org/fedup. LWN is not the appropriate venue for that.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 6:16 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Suggestions are not appropriate on LWN? Are we not allowed to discuss free software without going to a bug tracker? Most of us may not even be users of fedup/fedora (I'm not). This sort of discussion can be useful to users and developers on other systems.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 7:26 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

If your goal is to just talk about it you can do that anywhere but if your purpose is to help make the software better bug trackers are the right way to do that. I expect lwn users to know that. You can do both even if you don't use fedup. I have done that myself. Report it in a way that reaches developers. Post it here and discuss it if you think it will help others

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 9:32 UTC (Thu) by torquay (guest, #92428) [Link]

.. if your purpose is to help make the software better bug trackers are the right way to do that. I expect lwn users to know that. You can do both even if you don't use fedup. I have done that myself. Report it in a way that reaches developers. Post it here and discuss it if you think it will help others

You may expect certain behaviour, but that doesn't mean the expectation itself is correct. Whether you like it or not, people will post suggestions, comments, observations, etc wherever they feel like. Obviously you are well connected with Fedora development, and hence you are certainly able to mention the observations people have posted on LWN to the appropriate developers. Since one of the concrete purposes of Fedora is a perpetual test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, people posting here are in effect providing free labor to Red Hat, and to the greater Fedora community. The least you could do is be polite about it instead of "expecting" things and telling people what they can or cannot do here.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 10:31 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

If people reply to me directly with suggestions on software I don't work on, I ask them to report it the developers involved with the understanding that they actually want their suggestions to be heard and acted upon. That expectation is the standard arrangement. It is entirely inefficient for me to act as a proxy and while I have done that on occasions, that simply cannot scale as you are already aware. I will continue to hold the expectation that LWN users have a better understanding of the dynamics of free software than most places. There is nothing impolite about it, atleast for LWN users. Quite the opposite.

Also, I don't agree with the assertion that contributing bug reports to free and open source software can be considered as free labor. It is a mutual benefit. You contribute your feedback as a Fedora user and you get the benefits of your contributions as well as everyone including any vendors involved. If you don't that think arrangement is fair, you don't have to participate in the process nor do you.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 11:23 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

You missed a GP point - you said "You contribute your feedback as a Fedora user" - one of the GP's explicit points was if you were NOT a fedora user!

For example, Red Hat and Debian (in all their guises) are, for whatever reason, distros I avoid. But yes, I know, in helping them good karma probably will happen to me too :-)

Cheers,
Wol

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 19, 2013 11:31 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I didn't miss it at all and replied to GP directly but torquay is a Fedora user and I did mention "everyone else" as well anyway. It doesn't matter which distro you use, the improvements made via Fedora flows upstream and likely benefits you as well as long as you are a Linux user.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 20, 2013 2:49 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

If people reply to me directly with suggestions on software I don't work on...

I did not contact you directly at all, about software you don't work on or otherwise. What I did do was to offer a design suggestion in a public forum based on my 30 years of writing systems code for UNIX-like OSs. You are free to take that suggestion or to leave it.

I did think that it would be fair to follow your advice, however blunt and demotivating, and log the issue with your bug tracker. Sadly I found myself pushing a button marked "I am human" but not being allowed to proceed further.

Thank you for the interesting insight into the ways the Fedora Project attempts to build relationships with its users.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 20, 2013 4:18 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Your previous post here was certainly a reply to me and I felt obligated to respond. I don't see where the interface requires you to confirm that you are a human. Perhaps you are trying to login using a FAS account as opposed to clicking on the new bug report link which would lead to

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora&...

Hope that helps. Also, my comments here are my own as always and do not represent any views of any project or any other individual or company.

A note for those upgrading to Fedora 20

Posted Dec 18, 2013 19:15 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

The fedup 0.7 issue as well as all other "common bugs" are listed in the Fedora 20 common bugs page... which everyone who is doing an upgrade should skim through along with the release notes, right? LMDDGTFY (Let me Duck Duck Go that for you):

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F20_bugs

They make that page each release for a reason.