preupgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 9 smooth

[stan]

stan wrote:
> Used preupgrade available at 
> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=6045 to 
> upgrade a Fedora 7 to Fedora 9.  Worked well and even handled 
> problems.  Saved me downloading a lot of stuff I didn't want, and got 
> all the stuff I did.
>
> The first problem was that the root directory ran out of space after 
> stage 1.  Preupgrade went into backup mode and downloaded the rest of 
> the stages during upgrade.
>
> The second problem was that the root directory ran out of space during 
> transaction check.  I was able to reboot to the existing OS, remove 
> some large packages (it told me how much space was needed), and restart.
>
> The third problem was that a package was corrupt.  I was able to 
> restart the computer, boot into Fedora 9, and it had installed 
> everything except that package (well, the package is there.  I'll 
> probably remove and reinstall it).  So the system is up and running 
> immediately.
>
> This was not a small upgrade as there are 3900+ packages.  At the end 
> there are less than a hundred packages that didn't get updated.  Some 
> from third party repositories, some are obsolete.  Very successful.  
> To find the packages that aren't updated run a command like
> rpm -qa --qf 
> "%{INSTALLTIME}\t%{INSTALLTIME:day}\t%{NAME}\t%{SUMMARY}\n" | sort -n  
> > all_installed_pkgs.txt  They will be the packages at the start of 
> the file.
>
> So kudos to the developers of preupgrade!  I found it while looking 
> for a solution to the grub error 2 on live install where the MBR isn't 
> written and maybe it is a good thing I had the problem. :-)
>
> A couple of suggestions after watching the process occur.
>
> Integrate bit torrent into this and prioritize the basic packages for 
> download first (glibc, kernel, hal, etc.) so that while the downloads 
> are occurring the basics can be sharing out to others.  It took 18 
> hours to download the packages.  If 10000 people are doing this, it 
> would really speed up the transfer for everyone to use a torrent.  
> Also, for those of us who don't use torrent regularly, it would ensure 
> that the security aspects were handled correctly.
>
> Install the basic items first so that if there are problems the system 
> is bootable so the problems can be resolved from within it.
>
> Give people the option of keeping the packages from the anaconda 
> install so they can do other upgrades.  I intend to use them for all 
> of my upgrades.  Because of the error I didn't see the end game so 
> this might already be there.
>
>
> Again, wonderful piece of work.  I can't imagine doing anything else 
> from now on.
>
Forgot one other suggestion.  When the updates are completed and the 
message box comes up saying, this could take a little while, it would be 
great if there was some kind of progress indicator or explanation.  It 
took a few hours, as long as the install did.  Because everything else 
worked so well, and I could see the hard disk light going, I gave it the 
benefit of the doubt and presumed it hadn't hung.  But it would be nice 
to see some feedback.