Fedora Upgrade

Summary

Upgrade Fedora to next version using yum upgrade.

Owner

Name: Miroslav Suchý
Email: msuchy@redhat.com

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 19
Last updated: 2012-11-23
Percentage of completion: 10%

What works

wiki page, which worked for several releases in past.
Script, which can upgrade from F17 to F18.

What needs work

write man page
create package
do package review and get it into Fedora
testing - a lot of testing
decide that upgrade path using important

Detailed Description

Currently only supported upgrade method is using Anaconda. PreUpgrade is only wrapper, which just reduces maintanance window, but still require Anaconda. Which means quite long outage and do upgrade on-site (or using some KVM). But on-line upgrade is possible. E.g in Debian world it is even prefered method. In Fedora exist upgrade using yum as unofficial method for long time. A lot of people are using upgrade using yum for long time and the "problem ratio" is at least on pair with Anaconda upgrade. In fact most problems comes from improper packaging. E.g. maintainer forgot to obsolete, so during upgrade user get file conflict. Once these problems are reported and fixed the upgrade is without problem. If this method will be tested by FedoraQA, then I believe this upgrade method can be safely recommended to user.

Benefit to Fedora

Upgrade method which does not rely on Anaconda. And allow to provide upgrade method with nearly zero downtime.

Scope

Currently support only upgrade from N-1 version.

Test it on all supported platforms and probably on Secondary Arches as well.

Test it with different comps groups installed (Desktop, web server...)

How To Test

Download https://raw.github.com/xsuchy/fedora-upgrade/master/fedora-upgrade to machine with Fedora 17 and run it. You should end up with Fedora 18. Check if everything is correct.

User Experience

Upgrade without interruption of service. Only interrupted for aproximately 50 seconds needed for reboot.

Upgrade script is bash script, which is for power user like receipt. So if somethings breaks, admin can easily continue by investigating script - unlike anaconda or dracut, which is black box.

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

There is bunch of upgrade methods: PreUpgrade and Anaconda Installer. None of them conflicts with FedoraUpgrade. And if there will be problem with FedoraUpgrade we can easily rollback to PreUpgrade and Anaconda Installer.

Source

https://github.com/xsuchy/fedora-upgrade

Documentation

None yet.

Release Notes