Thoughts on FC and the future..

[Rick Stevens]

Sam Barnett-Cormack wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, William Hooper wrote:
> 
> 
>>Sam Barnett-Cormack said:
>>
>>>Given the track record with redhat of how often upgrades go wrong,
>>
>>The upgrade on my laptop from RHL9 to FC1 went completely without problems.
>>
>>
>>>and
>>>the fact that such an upgrade requires more downtime, I think a lot of
>>>people will worry about that.
>>
>>I would prefer more planned downtime than the downtime that comes from
>>breaking something.  All upgrades will require downtime, some more than
>>others.  As I said in a previous post, trying to get a distro to upgrade
>>through yum, etc. isn't a bad thing, just as long as people understand
>>that it may not be possible in some cases (like FC1 -> FC2 IMHO).  APIs,
>>config files, library versions change, and trying to change these while
>>you are using them can cause Bad Things (tm).
> 
> 
> Your points are well made and valid - I suppose some things are a matter
> of taste, although those points you make seem to not affect other
> distros already using the rolling model.
> 
> 
>>>Is fedora there to provide a good distro to users, or to exploit users
>>>to redhat's commercial benefit?
>>
>>You'll have to pardon me for not looking over my shoulder for the black
>>heliocopters...
>>
>>Fedora IS the community.  So the community is there to provide a good
>>distro to the community.  You would probably do well to get over the "I'm
>>a user, Fedora owes me..." mentality.
> 
> 
> I far from think that, I apologise for any offence I may have caused the
> developers.
> 
> However, I stand by my point that the part of the community doing the
> development does need to listen to the wishes of the users.

(poking my hideous great hooter into this)...
As the manager of over 600 servers (and fully half being Linux), I find
that the risks of upgrading a "live" machine far outweigh the downtime
of doing it offline.  While the hiccups we've experienced have been
fairly benign, several took longer to sort out than any downtime we may
have saved by doing a live update.

Do what you will.  I think one is playing with a loaded gun when one
upgrades a busy machine.  At the very minimum, it should be at single
user mode with as many daemons shut down as possible.  It should be
taken off the network if possible, upgraded, CHECKED (iptables, etc.),
and only then put back up and online.

However, as Dennis Miller says, "That's just my opinion.  I could be
wrong."
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  BASIC is the Computer Science version of `Scientific Creationism' -
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