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Open Source Operating Systems Linux

Fedora Linux Might Drop Incremental Upgrades (happyassassin.net) 91

Posted by Soulskill from the how-to-save-an-hour-a-year dept.
prisoninmate writes: As you might know, Fedora and many other GNU/Linux distributions require users to do an incremental upgrade when attempting to move from an older version of the operating system to the most recent one. For example, if you want to upgrade from Fedora 21 to Fedora 23, you will have first to upgrade to Fedora 22. Lately, Fedora upgrades have become more stable and reliable, mostly because of some brand-new technologies, such as the DNF package manger. Fedora's Adam Williamson theorizes about an innovative method that might support official upgrade of the Fedora Linux operating system across two releases in the future.
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Fedora Linux Might Drop Incremental Upgrades More

Fedora Linux Might Drop Incremental Upgrades

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  • 20 to 23 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rfengr ( 910026 ) on Saturday January 16, 2016 @08:15PM (#51315953)
    I have gone from 20 to 23 via upgrades with no issues. The fedora team does a pretty good job with the instructions and methods. Now if they would only get rid of the stinking graphical boot and the "quiet" mode. What do people fear kernel messages at boot?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by armanox ( 826486 )

      I've got GRUB set to not use the quiet or RHGB options, but then again I'm still using GRUB 1 so that I can configure it.

    • Did you do this with fedup? From what I could see, it was possible [despite the dire warnings from fedora about "don't do it"].

      And, I've edited grub.cfg to remove "quiet" and "rhgb" not so much because of aesthetics, but because my graphics card was having issues with some versions of the nouveau driver.

  • I've been doing this for years (Score:4, Informative)

    by daremonai ( 859175 ) on Saturday January 16, 2016 @08:17PM (#51315961)
    I routinely skip versions when doing Fedora upgrades. In fact, I just recently upgraded five systems from Fed 21 directly to Fed 23 without any real issues.

    Yeah, occasionally, when there are major changes, like when systemd (peace be upon it) was introduced, this might not work, but I've gotten through quite a few version skips just fine.

  • No thanks. If you want that, just rawhide yourself (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Etcetera ( 14711 ) on Saturday January 16, 2016 @08:22PM (#51315967) Homepage

    Fedora upgrades have become more stable and reliable, mostly because of some brand-new technologies, such as the DNF package manger.

    Excuse my while I hurl. dnf from an interface perspective has been nothing but a headache for 2.5 releases, and it STILL can't do the things with reliability that yum did, nor does it have the ecosystem of plugins for people with various edge cases. And don't even get me started about local file system + repo installs.

    Going back beyond that, "stable and reliable" is not the track record I would ascribe to anything about Fedora in the last 8 releases, except for maybe SELinux policy (except for the policy *RPM* which had a major clusterf*ck blocking update a couple of releases back).

    Fedora brought us such lovely presents like UsrMove, the confusing mish-mash of grub2, and the unholy holy war precipitated by strong-arming the "systemd way of doing thing" from the ground up, so much as restricting RPMs from having *any* SysV support in the spec file.

    So Fedora isn't inspiring a lot of confidence with moving to a direct rolling release. Frankly, people that want this might as well just sit on rawhide instead and re-vagrant/chef/devops/continainer their boxes anew each nanosecond.

    • Excuse my while I hurl. dnf from an interface perspective has been nothing but a headache for 2.5 releases, and it STILL can't do the things with reliability that yum did,

      What problems are there with dnf? I'm rather neutral towards it, but I haven't found any problems that I didn't have with yum.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Took far too long to be released, was overhyped during the time, and when it finally came out, by a different group of people, it was derided for being a fairly lazy sequel to DN3D.

    • I do run Rawhide - typically as if it were a rolling release, but it does tend to bork itself on occasion requiring a reinstall. As for yum,

      ~$ rpm -q yum
      yum-3.4.3-157.fc23.noarch

  • So basically what it says is that jumping from Fedora 21 to 23 is unsupported, but 21 -> 22 and 22 -> 23 is supported. Well that's nice, so why can't I daisy chain updates? It's not unique to Linux, I'm sure everybody who had to reinstall Windows knows what I'm talking about.... first there's a bunch of updates, then you can install some more updates, then update the updater, then install the service pack, then install some more updates, then some more security patches to the last updates. If you don'

    • Mostly it's because changes to the major version of a distribution tend to involve major-version transitions of multiple software packages, which tends to involve non-trivial differences in configuration files that users will have changed from the initial default contents. Packages can contain scripts to help deal with that, but if I'm doing a 21->23 upgrade I need to run both the 21->22 and the 22->23 scripts and that's hard when the 22 packages were never installed and the 21->22 scripts which

    • NLite has offered this for a long time, W7+ works according to the site (google if you like). Prep the original install plus service packs plus other updates, and you get a one shot install.

      Linux is no monolith, though, and I don't expect any distro to anticipate which updates need to be slipstreamed.

      And then we have the solution to a non monolith os, the package mananger. The os doesn't have built in updates, there are multiple managers to handle it.

      And that's why you get everything described here. If linu

  • Ubuntu does this already for their LTS releases (Score:3)

    by NotInHere ( 3654617 ) on Saturday January 16, 2016 @09:04PM (#51316069)

    welcome to the club :)

    • FWIW, I certainly didn't intend to present this as something unique or novel, that gloss has been added by the slashdot summary writer.

  • it seems like the MS win 10 strategy is making Linux distros follow suit. I wish Linux could get its own USP before copying MS. I love Linux mint but it's still catching instead of leading. open source is amazing, but how is this different to an apt-get upgrade? I shouldn't have to know this!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      Sorry, you lost me there. How is this even remotely related to the ongoing Windows 10 forced upgrade? Linux users by and large *want* to upgrade. And they do so regularly without losing major functionality. Even when the desktop GUI changes, say to Gnome 3, there's still Mate. Heck even KDE 3 is still available in some form for those who really want it. I don't mind Linux upgrades at all compared to Windows, because generally-speaking I don't lose anything.

      How is Linux Mint always catching instead of l

  • BSD (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    After moving to FreeBSD thanks to systemd I've noticed how much easier things like upgrades are. With a few command lines I can upgrade my base system and my programs thanks to ports are always up to date. No need to upgrade a whole linux distro version to get the latest updates to programs.

    • I have also moved to FreeBSD, but may move to CentOS 6.7.

      FreeBSD is awesome in many ways - seems perfect for servers.

      But, as a desktop, FreeBSD seems to have many short-comings. FBSD will not work with dropbox. It has very poor support for NTFS. FBSD does not auto-mount USB drives. I have not been able to get my VPN to work.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

        I have also moved to FreeBSD, but may move to CentOS 6.7.

        FreeBSD is awesome in many ways - seems perfect for servers.

        You're kidding right? The 1990s called and they want their OS back. BSD is so far behind in so many things it's almost like riding a bicycle instead of using a car. However if what you want to do only can be done by a bicycle, that's the tool to use. Don't use it for a real server. It's simply not up to the task in the way a modern Linux kernel is. Much better filesystems, there is no mandatory access controls in bsd... and so much more. If it weren't for the BSD people giving away their time to port it Ap

        • > Don't use it [FreeBSD] for a real server. It's simply not up to the task in the way a modern Linux kernel is.

          Does Netflix know this?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

            > Don't use it [FreeBSD] for a real server. It's simply not up to the task in the way a modern Linux kernel is.

            Does Netflix know this?

            Heh... funny you should ask. I signed up for netflix yesterday. From their site and offerings I think it's a captain obvious moment to say - Nope! They seem to be a business in trouble.

            • Regardless of whether, or not, you like Netflix offerings: Netflix handles a *huge* amount of traffic using FreeBSD servers.

  • Not being funny, but if incremental upgrades are supported, or were at one point, is there not a blindingly obvious fact that you could get an old one, and update it twice in a row transparently, and not tell the user?

    I understand that a properly non-incremental upgrade might be slightly faster but also it's likely to cock a lot of things up. I just don't get why - if there's an upgrade path from 1.0 to 2.0, and from 2.0 to 3.0, and from 3.0 to 3.1, you can't just install 3.1 over the top of 1.0. You don'

  • The summary seems to get this a bit garbled, so here's an executive summary:

    * This is simply about the support status of upgrades across more than one Fedora release
    * It's not about making any major technical / design changes to any software
    * It's certainly not about removing anything that is currently possible
    * Right now, upgrades across more than one release are technically possible, but until recently were not really tested and not necessarily considered 'supported'
    * We're now testing upgrades across two

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