Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 28, 2012 8:32 UTC (Tue) by michich (guest, #17902)
In reply to: Various notes on /usr unification by pj
Parent article: Various notes on /usr unification

In practice yum upgrades work in Fedora. There are users who upgraded all the way through from Fedora Core 1. One just has to read http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq to learn about the few version-specific gotchas that may have to be handled manually. In Debian you should read upgrade instructions as well (http://www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/amd64/release-note...).

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 28, 2012 17:53 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (6 responses)

Indeed,
With enough care and attentiveness most if not all gotchas for any distribution can be worked around. Based on the information in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 in that Debian document you reference I wouldn't really call the live Debian upgrade a fire and forget automated process either. You really do need to be aware of that document before you attempt it.

-jef

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 28, 2012 23:36 UTC (Tue) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link] (5 responses)

That's just official release notes. In practice you change your sources.list to point to the new distro, run apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get dist-upgrade, and reboot. Or at least my upgrade from lenny to squeeze worked like this IIRC.

And if you're running unstable, things are much more easier. You just upgrade once in a while and be happy.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 28, 2012 23:57 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (3 responses)

Wow.

Uhm okay. I guess reports like this are just fantasy right?
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=upgr...

The discussion for this bug:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=614159
relies heavily on pointing to the release notes on how to avoid the problems encountered.

And I particularly like this upgrade bug
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=598068
"Unfortunately there's no safe solution for it"

I will standby my previous statements as to anyone who thinks that live upgrading is a fire and forget process on any linux distribution. It is not..especially as the use case in question looks more and more like a median end-user usage case(with median end-users as admins) and less like a production server (with knowledgable admins at the helm making sure they do the necessary pre-upgrade prep)

-jef

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 29, 2012 3:28 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Shrug, sure, there are edge cases and bugs you could run into. But everyone I know who runs debian does do live upgrades, and it works. The parent comment's "in practice" is, in practice, what you actually do. (And speaking for myself, I don't bother to read the release notes before doing so.)

Now, I don't actually know how things work out in practice for Fedora, but the upgrade page says "Version updates without using anaconda - such as the yum method described here - is unsupported and not recommended!" and "Although upgrades with yum do work, they are not explicitly tested as part of the release process by the Fedora QA and are not documented in the Fedora installation guide."

Maybe that warning is wrong, but it really makes it *sound* like running yum upgrade is something that is not recommended and that is untested. While, in contrast, apt-get on a running system *is* the tested, documented, and supported upgrade mechanism for Debian. They really try to make sure it works properly for most users.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Mar 5, 2012 22:41 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Sounds like a smokescreen to me. All we are saying is that live upgrading a Debian system is supported, while on Fedora it is not. Not that it is flawless.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Mar 8, 2012 9:28 UTC (Thu) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

Stupid Debian-bashing (from a person who probably does not use it)
In place upgrades generally work just great and are supported on Debian. Sure they are not 100% perfect for everyone, but they have been for me.

Your Canonical-bashing is a lot better than this.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 29, 2012 11:57 UTC (Wed) by etiennez (guest, #53056) [Link]

Seriously, read the release notes before attempting upgrades of your Debian system. I never broke an upgrade because I always do, and a lot of my friends broke their system (not behind repair but still) because they didn't and it seems everybody on the Internet repeat that edit sources.list + apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade just works (except when it doesn't).

Important informations I can remember reading in release notes for example: apt-get/aptitude incompatibility that could cause half your system to be uninstalled, recommended upgrade tool (aptitude vs apt-get) for best result, renaming of hard drive device (hd* => sd*), + lots of useful advices to avoid breaking things (packages you should probably upgrade first, etc).

The squeeze upgrade was quite trouble free IIRC, but it is not always the case.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 29, 2012 4:47 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

I have a system that has been upgraded from Red Hat Linux 9 to Scientific Linux 6.2.

Red Hat Linux 9 -> Fedora Core 1 -> FC2 -> FC3 -> FC4 -> FC5 -> Centos 5 -> Scientific Linux 6.2

I must confess though that there are some old 'mailman' mailing lists on that thing that I am afraid to mess with. The way 'mailman' is configured changed somewhere along the way.