[indiana-discuss] Re: 3.1) Installation

[Ben Creitz]

On 6/13/07, Glynn Foster <Glynn.Foster at sun.com> wrote:
>
> Glynn Foster wrote:
> >         INS-2: Existing installations should allow a seamless
> >                upgrade to the next consecutive stable
> >                release or future releases within certain well
> >                defined boundaries.
>
> This requirement has a lot to do with user expectations and a possible release
> roadmap for this distribution. Before I finalized this document for sending, I
> had the following detail -
>
> "It should not be expected to support an upgrade skipping releases
> eg. A -> B -> C is supported, A -> C is not supported without an
> upgrade to B first."
>
> and in the end I was convinced that should be removed, especially since I
> believe Solaris supports upgrades from at least 2 releases behind. But the fact
> remains, what is the user expectation vs the potential for supporting that
> expectation?
>
> For example, say you have a 6 monthly time based release cycle (that mail
> discussion comes later)
>
>   IND-1 ----> IND-2 ----> IND-3 ----> IND-4 ----> IND-5
>
> Is there an expectation on the person running IND-1 to expect to upgrade to say
> IND-4, without going through IND-2 *and* IND-3, or a new install (and I count
> live upgrade in this space)? I personally don't think so (though an obvious nice
> to have), purely from the standpoint of having too many upgrade paths to figure
> out. This ties pretty strongly with package management, so it's likely we're not
> in any shape to figure this out just yet - though an interesting conversation to
> have.

I usually hear Linux sysadmins being suspicious of automated upgrade
from one 'release' to the next, favoring clean installs which give
them complete control and force them to carefully review the system in
question, which they should do once in a while anyway.  It seems like
a lot of work goes in to making release upgrades work, but if you read
for example the msgs on a LUG mailing list, everytime a new release of
distro X comes out, a bunch of people try to upgrade to that release
using the automated mechanism, the mechanism screws something up, and
they end up doing a fresh install.

Ben