[Gllug] Fedora Core 14

[Steve Parker]

On 04/02/12 02:14, Tethys wrote:
> Indeed. I recall a couple of years ago, someone from Red Hat posted
> a list of reasons why rolling upgrades couldn't be done in the general
> case, and a bunch of features that weren't possible without an external
> installer like anaconda. This was met with a deafening silence from all
> those in the Debian world that had been claiming RH was just being rubbish
> in requiring an external installer. Yes, there is a subset of machines
> that can be upgraded that way (and IIRC, Fedora does now support updating
> via yum for those machines). But there are others where it simply won't
> work.
Many OSes do support it though. I've had more direct experience with 
Solaris and Debian, and of course, if a third-party app requires a 
kernel driver, or simply doesn't support the new version of the OS, 
extra steps are needed to deal /with that application/ but there are 
many examples of OSes which can upgrade themselves in place. To pick an 
example out of the air, it's not RedHat's job to make sure that 
Symantec's code ensures that Veritas still works after an upgrade, but 
the system administrator is responsible for supporting both, and if that 
means uninstalling Veritas before the upgrade and reinstalling it 
afterwards then fine, that is part of the sysadmin's job.

I'm not saying that it should be possible via a simple "rpm -Uvh *"; 
Anaconda or similar is required, with (potentially complex) built-in 
knowledge of the differences between the old and new versions of the OS. 
Solaris for one imposes certain extra rules too - install third-party 
apps into somewhere such as /opt to keep them away from the core OS, for 
example. But overall, I fail to see the reason why a mainstream and 
relatively conservative OS claims to be inherently unable to upgrade itself.

Enlightenment most welcome...

Steve
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