dgoodwin's blog

Firstly thanks for all the comments on my last live upgrade post. Doug at silfreed.net has recently discussed the desire for the same feature here and here. jbowes pointed me to the PreUpgrade feature slated for Fedora 9, and several others posted actual ideas for fixes to the problem I ran into. (seems it was probably related to the fact that I'm running x86_64, which I forgot to mention) I now wish I'd blogged the problem first instead of chickening out and doing a DVD upgrade, but I still have an x86_64 desktop here I'll be upgrading once Fedora 8 is official.

The big question is whether or not the PreUpgrade feature is what we're looking for. To me it sounds pretty close. No discs to burn, two reboots instead of one (but that's pretty unimportant), it just sounds a little bit more scary to implement to me than letting yum handle everything but I really don't understand the process that well in either case.

If people feel yum upgrades are still more desirable, it sounds like creating a Fedora Special Interest Group is the first step, but I'm not sure what would be involved after that. I'm guessing we'd need (a) people willing to test live upgrades from time to time during the development process and file bugs against the packages causing problems, (b) the Fedora community's blessing to not instantly close or ignore such bugs (no idea what happens now with bugs related to live upgrades), and eventually (c) get the 'not recommended' message removed from the YumUpgradeFaq.

It looks as if (even in it's current state) live yum upgrades are pretty reliable with only some minor issues. I suspect it wouldn't be too much effort to give it that extra nudge. I'm pretty sure I could find some time to setup some vm's or extra hardware and test upgrades from time to time, but then again maybe the PreUpgrade will be as good or better.