Boxed version of Fedora

[Ian Weller]

On Sat, 22 Mar 2008, Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:

> Ian Weller escribió:
>> On Sun, 23 Mar 2008, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> If you have a Fedora store, selling a box as one of several items 
>>> available seems very logical and what users would expect.
>>
>> +1.  Also, it's not like the user is necessarily going to update to each
>> version, and they're not necessarily gonna buy it each time.
>>
>
> For this approach it would be *very* convenient to have a clean upgrade 
> path from release to release through yum, or other program that uses yum 
> as its backend to ensure stuff like user settings are migrated to the 
> new version as painlessly as possible. System settings are harder to 
> deal with, but at least user data should be "simple" enough for an 
> automated process. The hardest part is without a doubt the partitionning 
> of the disk space, especially since Fedora uses LVM as default. However 
> this can be circumvented by creating two volumes and assigning at least 
> a minimum % of disk space to be set as /home, so user data can be 
> migrated from release to release. The "system" part of this migration 
> would involve four files: passwd, group, gshadow and shadow, however, 
> since in Fedora default user profiles use uid and gid numbers of 500 on 
> ward, isolating these instances with association to directories found 
> under /home, would be relatively easy to perform from within Anaconda, 
> and for user-created groups, this could also be possible by checking 
> user members of these groups and their associated /home directory to be 
> migrated. However this work, as fas as I know, has not been done to 
> Anaconda (I should really start learning Python!), though it could be 
> relatively easy to do through use of shell scripts. The partition 
> template is what I wouldn't know how to do. Still if a user has an older 
> layout, how to migrate the user data? This poses a big problem, as the 
> disk partitionning and formatting will erase all contents of the disk, 
> so this could only be done by having a minimum version of Fedora which 
> can be upgraded (for example, upgrade support only available from F10 
> onward, which upgrade is possible from F10 to F11, but not from F9 to 
> F10). I know these ideas would have to be discussed in the -devel 
> mailing list or IRC channel, but this underlying infrastructure would 
> certainly make more feasible a retail model of having only odd or even 
> release numbers available through retail. I know there is much more 
> involved in system upgrade than user data and application and system 
> configuration data, and that usually upgraded systems feel less 
> responsive than installed-from-scratch systems, but it could be a start.

How does Ubuntu do it?  I remember upgrading my sister's computer with
one click, and it appeared to work perfectly -- until she decided to
unplug the computer during the upgrade. >.<  I have no clue what the end
result would've been, but it was probably the best upgrade interface
ever.