Fedora version update without ISOs

[David Mack]

Yesterday, I updated a system from FC6 to F7 entirely across the
Internet. There aren't a huge number of problems that would need to be
fixed to make this process painless:

1) need a better way to install the fedora-release and
fedora-release-notes RPMs. Since the current release was 6 and the
desired release was 7, yum update didn't find the new fedora-release rpm
and the only way to get it was to use rpm to update against the fedora
download URL. Not a big deal if you know where to look but a pain for
newbies. Why are the release notes in a separate RPM?

2) after installing the new fedora-release and fedora-release-notes, yum
update ran into a number of problems. First, quagga and a couple of
other packages had to be excluded because of inconsistencies. This is
flatout procedural failure in adding things to the repo. Nothing new.

3) once the necessary exclusions were in place, I started running into
conflicts with older installed packages that depended on libraries that
yum tried to replace (up2date and 4Suite, to name a couple.) Nuking
these older packages with rpm -e eventually got me to the point at which
all of the F7 packages were downloaded and installed, probably 8-10 "yum
update;rpm -e" iterations. This may be the toughest problem in cleaning
up this process - either a change to anaconda or a separate tool is
needed that can compare installed packages against a specific release
and let the user decide which things to eliminate. Would the --obsoletes
flag to yum have taken care of this? Last time I used that, it didn't
seem to work.

4) after step 3 completed, I was able to go back and run yum update with
no exclusions and install quagga and the other things I had initially
had to exclude.

5) Voila! An up-to-date F7 without ISOs. In your face, Ubuntu!

Now someone can tell me the right way to have done this. 

Dave