On 11/17/2016 07:26 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: > Hi, folks! > > While looking into an issue with how GNOME Software decides which > release to offer an upgrade to when there's more than one plausible > candidate, I noticed something interesting: we do not actually have a > policy on what we 'recommend' people to do in this case. > > There's one specifically planned-for (I'm trying hard to avoid using the > word 'supported' here) case where a Fedora user may want to upgrade > across two release versions at once. It's why we do the release cycle > 'overlap', where the N-2 release is maintained for a month after the N > release goes stable: we specifically want to allow people not to have to > upgrade every single release, but allow them to upgrade every other > release instead. > > That is, we're generally on record as thinking it's OK to go 23 -> 25 -> > 27 -> 29 etc., so long as you do the upgrade within a month of the new > release coming out each time. > > However, if you look at our official instructions on upgrading: > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade > https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/24/html/Installation_Guide/chap-preparing-for-installation.html#sect-preparing-upgrade-or-install > (that one just links to the wiki page) > > You'll notice we don't explicitly specify *how* you should do this. That > is, if you're currently running Fedora 23, and you want to upgrade to > Fedora 25 next week, are you supposed to: > > i) Upgrade to Fedora 24 first, then from Fedora 24 to Fedora 25 > ii) Upgrade directly to Fedora 25 > > It's hard for us to request specific behaviour from gnome-software when > we don't actually know which approach we as a distribution recommend :) > > A couple of releases ago, direct N+2 upgrades were written into the > release criteria, which now read: > > "For each one of the release-blocking package sets, it must be possible > to successfully complete a direct upgrade from fully updated > installations of the last two stable Fedora releases with that package > set installed." > > openQA tests direct N+2 upgrades of Workstation, KDE, Server and minimal > package sets. > > This is obviously indicative, but still, it only considers clean > installs of the release-blocking package sets. In the real world, people > upgrade with much messier package sets. > > As another data point, while updating the 'upgrading with bare dnf' (not > dnf-system-upgrade) instructions a couple of weeks back, I noticed those > instructions recommended the 'upgrade one release at a time' strategy. > > So, I guess the questions here are: > > 1) Which of the two should be our 'officially recommended' approach? > 2) Should we also say the other one is OK but just less-recommended, or > specifically discourage it? OK, so we have two cases here: 1) gnome-software as is currently in F23 and F24 2) gnome-software future releases For (1), the version of gnome-software in F23 and F24 currently doesn't have the UI in place to allow choosing which version to upgrade to, so gnome-software needs to somehow automatically pick the version. My idea here was patch F23 and F24 gnome-softwares so that they always offer the latest non-development version, bounding it to N+2. Example: A user has F23 installed. F24 comes out. gnome-software offers to upgrade to F24. 6 months later F25 comes out, gnome-software switches to offering a F23 to F25 upgrade. 3 years later when F23 and F25 are both EOL, F23 gnome-software still continues to offer the F25 upgrade. As for (2), I guess we should do the same as (1) but just allow the user to choose the N+1 release as well in addition to N+2. -- Kalev _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
