Over the last couple of days I’ve had cause to upgrade a Fedora install and some Ubuntu systems. To say that Fedora looked a little sad would be quite the understatement; both Ubuntu systems (going to 7.10 from 7.04 and 6.10) breezed through the process by and large; the 6.10 box had a few manual interventions required (mostly as the result of having added debs from a mythtv repo), but the Fedora FC4 to FC5 was… not nice.
Where to start? Well, call me spoiled, but I’ve become accustomed to over-the-wire upgrades, rather than having to reboot with a CD or DVD. Yum can, in theory, do that, but it’s not recommended as being hit and miss.
Since I don’t have a DVD in the server in question I ended up trying to upgrade from a loopback ISO image, anyway and the pain was significant, mostly because there’s not real information about packages becoming obsolete or being split into many new sub-packages. You can use rpm -F (in which case the lack of obsolete/superceede information will cause it to fail) or rpm -U (if you want everything, which you don’t). Oh, and bonus points for the updates to numerous FC4 packages having version information that makes rpm think they are more current than their FC5 versions, even when they aren’t, really.
And, to top it all off, yum stopped working, because, it turns out, urlgrabber doesn’t work if nisplus is in the hosts line of /etc/nsswitch.conf.
