yet another day in fedora land...

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Sun, 2008-12-14 at 13:39 -0500, Nathan Meyers wrote:
> Stephen Adler wrote:
> > Well, I was about to get divorced from Feroda and perhaps start an 
> > affair with ubuntu... Long story short, my desktop setup just seemed to 
> > get buggier and buggier, with application not running right, windows 
> > freezing up bla bla bla...
> >
> > So I decided to do the dirty and reinstall fedora 10 from scratch. They 
> > way I got to fedora 10 in the first place was through an upgrade from 
> > fedora 8. What a difference...
> >
> > It comes down to this basic principle which I should follow from now 
> > on.... Never upgrade, always install. The only think that I can think of 
> > is that there was too much crud from fedora 8 laying about after the 
> > upgrad to fedora 10 that things didn't quite work. It's not so much that 
> > old fc8 rpms were laying about, but fc8 settings and configurations were 
> > left in place instead of running the new fc10 settings. Anyway, a fresh 
> > install of fc10 fixed all that.
> >   
> I've never had a successful upgrade with Red Hat and its offshoots - I 
> haven't even tried in a few years after some really dismal experiences.

Erm, "a few years" is a LONG time in Linux distribution time. Hell, "a
few years" ago, Ubuntu didn't even exist. So I don't think that's such a
useful data point.

Regardless, I'm really quite curious why people have had such problems
with upgrades. I've done rolling upgrades from release to release dating
back to Red Hat Linux 6.2. Certainly, there have been bumps here and
there (particularly when moving from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel w/a
disk controller that used a completely different driver between the
two), but I've certainly never had any disastrous end results, nor have
I ever had to resort to a clean install. My only guess is that problems
typically involve systems with lots of software NOT shipped by the
distro...

My contrasting experiences:
My laptop was originally installed with pre-F8 rawhide, ran F8 for a
while, updated to pre-F9 rawhide, ran F9 for a while, updated to pre-F10
rawhide, now running F10. Last time I did a clean install on my mail/web
server machine was when I moved it to a new motherboard aboutt three
years ago. Pretty sure it was originally Fedora Core 5. Today, it runs
Fedora 10, and its run every version in between. My myth backend server
has changed hardware a few times now, but the last time it was clean
installed was Fedora Core 6. Its now running Fedora 10, and has run
everything in between. (Side note, my mythtv database on said machine
still contains data going back to October of 2003...). My Mac Mini
frontend was originally installed w/F7, has been upgraded from release
to release, now runs F10 too. And so on.

Clean installs are nice once in a while, but I typically only bother
with such things for new hardware or test systems. Of course, take
everything I said here with a grain of salt, given that I get paid to
work on the distro itself, so I'm not your typical end-user... But I
really do wonder why others have had such problems.

--jarod