Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Jul 24, 2013 20:29 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next" by orev
Parent article: Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

I think that's a fair perception. Often when an update breaks something, it's because of upstream breaking compatibility (foo version 1.9 is subtly incompatible with databases saved by foo version 1.8), but Fedora just doesn't have the manpower to verify all new upstream versions, nor to carefully backport security fixes to foo 1.8 as Debian would.

A reinstall every 12 months is okay, for many applications (IMHO you should configure your server so it can be reinstalled from scratch quickly in any case) but day-to-day breakage caused by seemingly innocuous package updates is not. And while I am happy to keep my server configuration under version control so I can reinstall it, nobody wants to bother with that stuff for their personal workstation.

That said, 99% of the time 'yum update' works just fine, perhaps with an Apache restart needed in the worst case.

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Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Jul 31, 2013 10:56 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

Intersting to see that most Fedora users still download & do a fresh install while the openSUSE folks have largely moved on to in-place upgrading: http://youtu.be/NwfohZ8RBd8?t=16m40s

Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Aug 2, 2013 2:57 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Agreed. I don't remember the last time I did a fresh install on a machine which wasn't brand new.

On this laptop, "yum history info 1" lists F15 packages (it's currently F19). The desktop has F17 as its original history entry, so I guess I did to a reinstall for it (though I don't remember why exactly…).