On Wednesday 11 November 2009 22:35:14 Michael Pawlowsky wrote: > The constant upgrades are driving me nuts. We have machines at FC8-FC9- > FC10 and FC-11. > > The main reason we are using FC is because one it's free (in a sense). > The next one is that it does include more recent versions of packages > that we use and are looking for the latest versions to take advantage > of some new features and so on. How do you expect to get the latest version of anything while not upgrading? Not upgrading and getting fresh packages are sometimes mutually exclusive options. > But now since FC8 is no longer being supported, it has caused some > real issues. One main one is that yum is not updated and even rpm > packages that we create ourselves will no longer install on it. F8 is way unsupported. F9 as well. F10 will be supported only for a couple of months more. Every Fedora release has 13 months life cycle. That is the price of having cutting edge software. > So basically we are in a never ending cycles of upgrades. And since we > have had bad experiences trying to upgrade over the last version, our > policy is to back up the data, re-install and put back in all the data. I agree, clean install is always the safest way. Upgrading is getting better and better, but there might always be some unknown quirks. > I'm thinking of trying ESXi to make installing quicker. Reconfigure an > new image locally, clone it and push it to the virtual server. That is also a good idea if you have good enough hardware to make it useful, and want to minimize downtime. > Also, I am wondering why it is not possible to simply keep upgrading > packages, kernel and so on, as opposed to coming up with new versions > every six months. Because sometimes a new version of something requires a completely different infrastructure which is incompatible with the old one. For example, you cannot go from ext3 filesystem to ext4 without reformatting the drive. You cannot upgrade glibc without a complete rebuild of the whole system that relies on it. You cannot go from static dev to udev functionality without a reinstall. There are many more examples. Being cutting edge, Fedora sometimes needs an inside-out redesigning to adapt to new, latest technology and software. This redesigning is sometimes conceptually incompatible with the old design, and requires a new Fedora release and hence an upgrade. > To make things more difficult, our servers need to be up 24/7. > > Is FC simply a bad choice for enterprise production. In most cases, yes. If you want long-term stability, I can recommend CentOS, but then give up on having latest&greatest software. HTH, :-) Marko -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
