Call for comments - RPM upgrade

[Dennis Gilmore]

Once upon a time at band camp Tue, 11 Nov 2003 5:19 pm, Warren Togami wrote:

> It is my opinion that RH8 and RH9 should be upgraded to the latest
> versions for the respective distros.  Regarding Barry K. Nathan's
> concern about the epoch promotion problem, could you please post a
> concrete example of what triggers that problem?  The entire list needs a
> refresher about exactly what this problem is.

Most definetly i have never experienced issues with rpm  so i have never 
bothered to look into what others have experienced.  i only know what ive 
read from posts to mailing lists.


> Two more long term notes:
> 1) Some have suggested a rewritten rhn_applet and up2date for RH7.3, RH8
> and RH9.  They suggested that after RHN stops providing software update
> services, perhaps a community based notification service could take its
> place.  I personally think a centralized service may have trust issues
> like "would you trust your server package information with total
> strangers?"  The next best thing would be a host-based service that
> daily checks for updates, then sends notification e-mail to the sysadmin
> if updates are available.  The notification e-mail recipient address and
> possibly SMTP server would then be configured during firstboot and
> System menu.

I think a better option would be removal of rhn_applet,  and approach Red Hat 
to see if we could get a licence for a Satelite up2date server  we could then 
rebuild up2date with the default configuration changed to point to our server  
and not  Red Hats. This would then require the user to make a concious 
decision to move to Fedora Legacy.  of course we would offer yum and apt for 
maintainence but if the user wished to still use up2date we could offer that 
service also.  this will only affect the RHL product line.  we could maybe 
backport to RH 9 the up2date from Fedora Core 1 perhaps but that defeats the 
goal of only providing security updates and not adding new features.

as far as notification of users goes a mailing list for announced updates 
would be best IMHO.  a list that can only be posted to by Fedora Legacy 
admins when updates are released.  by being read only it will be guaranteed 
to be low traffic.  mails should be in a format simmilar to the errata 
notification emails Red Hat Send out.

> 2) Before I forget about this... in our RPM upgrade instructions for RH8
> and RH9, the docs should mention turning off all services that could
> cause RPM database contention.  That would mean the RHN applet, rhnsd,
> Red Carpet's daemon, yum's cron thing, or anything else that could
> possibly touch the RPM database during rpm upgrade.  This would lessen
> the chance of RPM deadlocking during the rpm upgrade.  After the upgrade
> it can be safely turned on again.

Deffinetly agree we need to minimise the chances of something going wrong in 
the process.

Dennis