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

[Nate Duehr]

On Jun 3, 2007, at 1:57 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>> I'd love it too.  I wonder what the holdup is, given that it often
>> already works.  Maybe my configurations are too vanilla to see the
>> problems.
>
> Well, my understanding is that there are some odd special cases that
> anaconda (the installer/upgrader) handles that yum can't.

 From what I've seen of the process, that doesn't make a lot of sense  
to me.  Anaconda and yum are basically both just relying on what the  
underlying RPM package does.  If the package maintainer has poorly  
designed the pre and post run scripts in the package, breakage seems  
to occur.

> Things like:
> switching lvm from old to lvm2, odd special cases to work around rpm
> bugs (like when a package changes a directory to a symlink), etc.

Many packages in Debian do one of two things here:
1. Notify the end-user that lvm2 is now available and that lvm will  
be deprecated and unsupported "soon" and point them to instructions  
on how to update it themselves.
2. Really good packages look to see what's installed and handle the  
update with warnings that doing it in multi-user mode or without a  
reboot (kernel packages come to mind here), isn't really complete.

I think the problem is more subtle than the technical details  
mentioned thus far.  The subtle problem is that if some package does  
not upgrade cleanly, it's not really the developer's problem in the  
RH world.  The dev can just say, "sorry, not my problem".  When you  
have the discipline to put rules around it stating that an entire  
distro release process will come to a screaming halt if the devs  
don't come up with a way to do the upgrade cleanly (a release- 
critical bug), all of a sudden some very creative ways to fix the  
piddly little technical problems start to show up.

You also have the added side-benefit of weeding out the devs who  
"can't be bothered" with such niceties as taking care of the end-user  
and making an upgrade a good experience for them.

I think the majority of RH/Fedora devs *do* care, but they still have  
an "out" when the going gets tough.  The leadership of Fedora should  
close that loophole instead of apologizing for it.

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com