[CLUE-Tech] upgrading from FC1 to FC2

[Nate Duehr]

On Jul 8, 2004, at 12:25 PM, Greg Knaddison wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 10:15:28 -0600, Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>  
> wrote:
>>
>> Debian tests that style of upgrade, Fedora does not.
>
> I think this is kind of apples to oranges...

>> If it's not possible to do a apt-get dist-upgrade and end up with a
>> sane system coming from any stable release to any stable release, it's
>> a Release Critical or Grave level bug in Debian.  I've never seen that
>> level of dedication to online upgrades from RH/Fedora.
>
> Start with being able to do an FTP/HTTP install of Fedora. Then
> recognizge that many people have successfully done upgrades in the
> RH/Fedora recommended manner of: run anaconda, select "upgrade"
> instead of "reinstall".  You get pretty close to the debian style
> upgrade, right?

I thought the Fedora recommended manner was to boot from CD and run  
anaconda from there?  If so, it's nothing like Debian's upgrade where  
all of my services continue to run until they need to be shut down by  
the upgrade...?

>> Not saying this to start a distro war about upgrades... it's just an
>> observation.  If you need in-place upgrades, go with a distro that  
>> puts
>> a higher priority on them.
>
> So maybe this is the difference - the "in place" part of it.  Seems
> like you're guaranteed downtime when you do the Debian upgrade due to
> a reboot (I assume a reboot since the Debian rev-levels appear to be
> tied to Kernel release levels)...you just might have more of it when
> doing the RH/Fedora style of release upgrade.  Right?

In a Debian dist-upgrade the reboot is all the way at the end... major  
services stay running "as long as they can" which usually means right  
through the upgrade period.  If a daemon is upgraded and can be  
restarted, it usually is.   (This starts to head into whether or not a  
specific package maintainer's packages are "sane", but generally the  
package pre and post scripts try to keep things online.)

> I'm not sure how much more downtime you'd get even - According to
> http://www.flexbeta.net/main/articles.php? 
> action=show&id=70&perpage=1&pagenum=2
> it only takes 13 minutes to do the Fedora install to begin with and an
> upgrade should be faster because it doesn't have to reformat/partition
> anything.  Having to do 3 of those a year  (which is about the Fedora
> release) keeps you at three 9s of uptime and Fedora's not the
> "production" distribution.

Yeah, it's all a nit-pick I know, but I find it distasteful to have to  
down the box and boot off a CD to upgrade when I have another distro  
that's figured out how NOT to do that.  ;-)

--
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com