Fedora 7: Finishing upgrade process. This may take a little while...

[David Timms]

William Perkins wrote:
> Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>> William Perkins writes:
> 
>>> sleep before terminating.  I think I may need to kill the upgrade
>>> but I am hoping that one of these days the upgrade will finish.
> 
>> Yes, one day it'll finish.
> 
>>> I am wondering if this is normal when doing upgrades rather than
>>> a fresh install.
> 
>> Yes. For the last two-three releases, upgrades sucked. I hate to harp on
>> this, but large commercial customers do NOT do upgrades. They typically
>> either take a pristine RHEL installation image, or roll a company-specific
>> standard RHEL build. In either case, they just do a fresh install. The
>> server mounts all of its data over the network, the only thing on its
>> local disk is the OS. Because none of the data is hosted locally on each
>> server, and servers typically mount all data over the network, this
>> results in a turnkey installation process, for both new servers and
>> upgrades.
> 
>> Because large commercial customers don't care much for it, the upgrade
>> process is not much of a priority, as far as the development effort
>> goes.
> 
> That is too bad.  That upgrade process save me a lot of grief when I move
> Fedora systems to new versions of the distribution.
> 
>>                  The latter takes so long to get the system back to the
>> original configuration.  Any suggestions?
> 
>> Yeah.  Go out for dinner.  Maybe it'll be done by the time you come
>> back.  You would've had a nice meal, and would not have had to stare at
>> the monitor, all this time.
> 
> And that is just what I did: went to dinner.  When I got back to the
> system, it had just started setting up the bootloader before telling me to
> reboot.
> 
> Total time to upgrade: ~10 hours.  1016 files were updated in the Fedora 7
> upgrade process.  I have two more systems to do.  I think I will do both
> of them over-night tonight.  We shall see how long they take!

How many total packages do you have installed ? {one way: rpm 
-qa>rpm-qa.txt and then view rpm-qa.txt in gedit, and go to bottom to 
see line number in status bar}.

Note that upgrades require min of 512MB RAM [to do the package 
dependency calculation in], and also approximately the same amount of 
free space on disk  as the currently installed OS files take. This is 
because all new packages are installed, and then the old packages are 
"Cleaned up" {erased}.

DaveT.