[lug] Fedora 7 is out, but don't yum upgrade

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 08:33 -0600, Gary Hodges wrote:
> next to NIST).  They were peppered with questions about Fedora, 
> including the ability to upgrade.  They told us not to expect the 
> ability to upgrade with Fedora.  

Possibly (and I'm just guessing here) because Fedora is the bleeding
edge technology testbed for future RH releases.  I'm not certain if you
can upgrade easily with RH Enterprise, but I'd suspect that's something
they are asked to do often and so would have to support it in RHE.  But
Fedora doesn't have that requirement because of its stated intent.

Personally, I use Fedora.  I manage about 15 machines at work and 5-8
(depending on how many are not broken) at home.  About 1/2 are on FC5
right now and the rest on FC6.  Installing with a CD or via a network
install to a root partition created specifically to hold the OS (/home
and friends are on their own partitions) is one way to make sure
anything that got mucked up since the last upgrade is cleaned off with
the next one.  I wouldn't expect anyone who manages racks of blade
servers to want to do that (though you could with an NFS based
installation or similar), though I'd probably manage those systems with
PXELinux anyway.  Besides, wiping the old distro with a clean install is
one sure way of making sure you wiped any rootkits and associated
nasties from the system.

I'm also not a fan of .deb packaging.  I've used it before in a project
and it's a pain compared to RPMs.  But that's just one man's opinion.
When I need tighter control of the distribution for small-footprint
systems, I just roll my own (via the LFS recipe).  

To each his own, I guess.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Senior Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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