[ILUG] Fedora Suitability for RH upgrade

[Niall O Broin]

On Saturday 17 January 2004 12:11, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Saturday 17 January 2004 11:01, Niall O Broin wrote:
> > > I don't understand why so many people are against upgrading.
> >
> > I offer an alternative explanation. Maybe, just maybe, there are people
> > with more experience of upgrading than you and hence they have come
> > across problems which you haven't which made them wary of the whole
> > process. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.
>
> So, you have a problem upgrading and do a complete install instead.
> Is that any reason not to try upgrading the next time?

Yes, it is. I gather you earn your crust by teaching mathematics. I earn mine 
by managing computer systems. I can't afford to not know what may be the 
results of my actions. The operating systems with which I have most 
experience of attempting upgrades are Solaris and Linux. With neither of 
these operating systems have I ever had a completely smooth upgrade, and 
certainly the prevailing wisdom among professional Solaris users is NOT to 
use the upgrade mechanism but rather to do a clean install on test hardware, 
and then to transition your applications, data etc. 

Only when you're happy with the performance of your applications on test 
hardware do you do the same thing on production hardware.

Of course if you're an amateur desktop user, you may be quite happy with the 
convenience of a distribution install, and be prepared to put up with 
possible problems - your choice. As it happens, I recently upgraded my 
principal deskunder system and my notebook to SuSE 8.2 from SuSE 9.0. In both 
cases I saw the exact same error - the first time logging in to KDE after the 
upgrade did not succeed, resulting in a hanging desktop, but subsequent 
logins were OK.

Sometime later, I wanted to watch TV on my TV card - kwintv crashed. I deleted 
preferences files, reinstalled RPMs, did all manner of good things but to no 
avail - kwintv repeatedly crashed. I'm now running on a fresh install of SuSE 
9.0 on a different disk where kwintv works quite happily.

So distribution upgrades may work happily for you. My experience with them has 
been that they are NOT reliable, andI think it would be most remiss of me to 
attempt to use such an upgrade path on a customer's production system.




-- 
Niall