On 3/3/07, Gerhard Wiesinger <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello! Ist it possible to do a direct update via yum from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 6? (without updating FC1 => FC2 => FC3 => FC4 => FC5 => FC6). Can some of the versions be updated directly?
Executive Summary: The question is, which is faster: backing up your home directories and custom apps and reinstalling from scratch and restoring things to a new user home tree, doing an anaconda update for every step or yumming and cleaning up the mess and having some lingering cruft. Small upgrade jump: yum+cleanup will be faster Medium upgrade jump: anaconda will be faster Large upgrade jump: backup/restore+fresh install will be faster There is some fuzziness as to the definitions of small, medium large that is dependent on the complexity of your install and the number of fundamental changes in the distro system architecture. My experience: I have upgraded via yum many times but I don't recall ever making such a big leap (FC1->FC6) in one step. I would suspect that it is equally if not more dangerous/time-consuming to do the yum update one version at a time than doing it in one big step. Since there is no consistent config migration mechanism in yum (one of the main reasons it may break your machine when doing leaps between distro versions), I don't see much benefit of doing many small unprotected steps vs. one big one. You will have to deal with the same amount of mess and might even miss some particumessy steps. The story changes when you are upgrading via CD using anaconda. Anaconda appears to do some version specific config migration so it would make sense to do the update version by version so as to not miss out on migration steps that were in previous anacondas but taken out of more current ones. In any case, a yum upgrade that large will undoubtedly break things and possibly leave you system in an unbootable state. With enough knowledge and sifting through rpmsaves and booting from the rescue disk, you will be able to fix the problems. For a single step, the lingering cruft and mess cleaning from yum is fairly small but is cumulative every step. If you use anaconda for each step, the cruft is lower but anaconda is slower and the time it takes is cumulative every step. The backup/restoration of your home directory process is a one time cost no matter how many steps up you take but it is likely more time consuming than the single step yum or anaconda process. In any case, good luck. /Mike
