[lug] Old copies of Fedora?

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:02:06 -0600
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:

> All they need to do is the same thing the Debian did almost 10 years
> ago... make it a *requirement* of developers that packages MUST
> upgrade cleanly or warn the user that they cannot be upgraded and
> that manual intervention is required.
> 
> No, not every package DOES this 100%, but it's a RELEASE-CRITICAL BUG
> if they don't.  Some don't get caught until after release.
> 
> There are pre-installation and post-installation scripts built into
> all of the major package management systems for a reason.  Developers
> just need motivation to use them to keep breakage from happening
> during upgrades...

Sure, this is a great goal, but it's not all that easy in some cases. 
Do you have any links to what exactly debian requires here? 

Does it upgrade your database schema on upgrades of apps that need
that? Does it modify your config files if you modified them in a way
thats no longer compatible with the old version? 

In the recent set of upgrades I did here to f13, the only thing I can
recall that broke was squid. The config file format completely changed
between the two versions and rpm saw that I had modified squid.conf and
didn't replace it. I went in and looked at the .rpmnew file and docs
and had it working again in about 5minutes. Doing that automatically
would require some kind of config file parser and mapper... 

> "Must flatten box and reinstall at every release", is crap ... and
> just like Windows... and we all know it.  No matter what distro or
> package does it.  Quality desktop software should upgrade itself
> cleanly, period... as a general rule...

yeah, and in my experience it does these days. ;) 

Of course not re-installing you miss out on some new things that can
only be done at install time: new filesystems, new partitioning, etc,
but the old setup should keep working. 

kevin
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