On Sat, 2012-11-03 at 00:18 +0100, drago01 wrote: > On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 12:04 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > [...] > > * Upgrading every year, with an unreliable upgrade process, is not > > something you have to do with a proper stable OS > > I am not sure why you call it unreliable ... I *never* reinstall Because I read the forums =) It's not usually terribly unreliable for me either. But I'm a smart cookie like you. I update my systems with yum and I know what I have to do to make it work properly - I follow the instructions and I know how to wiggle my way around dependency issues. This is second nature to me as I'm sure it is to you. You've probably dealt with bugs on upgrades before that you've forgotten about, even. Also, I don't use third party repositories. Normal people do. Especially with a distro like Fedora which doesn't ship Flash, proprietary drivers, Chrome... I've been hanging around user forums for Mandriva, Fedora and Ubuntu for a decade now and I can tell you, every time a new release of any of those comes out, the forums get a big dump of people with problems upgrading. Regular as clockwork. has always happened, more or less will always happen. operating system upgrades are an insoluble problem, really. The number of variables involved in one is astronomical. Note that neither Red Hat nor Microsoft actually support major version upgrades for their operating systems, both of which have exponentially more testing done on them, much lower levels of churn, and much smaller sets of packages. (Also note how much trouble phone companies have updating Android.) I also know what we do to test upgrades before we sign off on a release, which is 'do a clean install of F-N in a VM and check it can be upgraded to F-N+1'. If that passes, we ship. That is not a level of testing which allows me to declare with confidence that our upgrade process is solid and reliable ;) > unless I really had to (moving one installation from i386 to x86_64). > Otherwise I always upgrade using either anaconda back in the days and > then preupgrade. > > There is some weird attitude that "upgrades don't work anyway people > should just reinstall". Not only is a reinstall a lot more work it is > just not something you could ask from a user to do every 6-12 months. > > Technically there is no difference between an upgrade and package > updates just the package set is larger, it just makes dealing with > stuff like usrmove easier. If an update from foo-1.0 to foo-2.0 breaks > the whole system it will regardless whether you upgrade from FN-1 to > FN or doing a "yum update" in a rolling release. Well, kinda. The advantage of a rolling release is that it tends to narrow the focus. You don't have a million people hitting five hundred potentially destabilizing updates all at once; you have a million people all getting one potentially destabilizing update at a time (or, at least, a fairly small set at a time). When everyone starts yelling, you can just look at what got updated the night before and probably find the culprit. That's what happens with Rawhide, after all. And anyway, I don't think a rolling release would be *better* from this point of view - as with my other points, I think a rolling release would allow us to do *just as well* while reducing our testing and development overheads. In a rolling release model, everyone deals with foo-1.0 to foo-2.0, then a week later they deal with bar-1.0 to bar-2.0, then a week later they deal with monkeys-1.0 to monkeys-2.0...in a 'stable' release model, everyone gets to deal with foo, bar, monkeys and five hundred other changes all at once. Which is chaos on a stick. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
