[Gllug] Fedora Core 14

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 12:18:42PM +0000, John Edwards wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 11:49:41AM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
> <snip> 
> > Skipping a version in Fedora upgrades generally seems to work, but
> > there are no guarantees. I recommend backing up your data and doing
> > a clean installation[1].
> 
> Why?
> 
> Even the early versions of RedHat Linux in the 1990s allowed for
> offline OS upgrades (you had to boot from CDROM). The main problems
> then were caused by installing 3rd party RPM packages which had bad
> dependencies.

It's partly because not all Fedora developers are keen to support
this.  My laptop has a "rolling upgrade" (of Fedora Rawhide) that I
usually only reinstall every 2-3 years, so it works reasonably if you
can deal with the breakage.

But it's mainly because no package manager (not rpm, not dpkg, nor any
other) has a formal specification which would allow one to prove that
upgrades would never fail.  All package managers are full of ad hoc
rules and all allow random scripts in packages.  It should be that two
machines that have { (P1, v1), (P2, v2), ..., (Pn, vn) } package sets
installed are byte for byte identical (excluding %config).  I'd be
surprised in the real world if they even contained the same files.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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