[katello-devel] Cross fedora version upgrades

Justin Sherrill jsherril at redhat.com
Mon Mar 18 14:11:18 UTC 2013


On 03/18/2013 07:37 AM, Miroslav Suchý wrote:
> On 03/15/2013 11:33 PM, Justin Sherrill wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> With the upcoming Katello 1.3 release we are only support RHEL 6 &
>> Fedora 18, which means this is the first katello release that does not
>> continue support across a single Fedora version (Previously fedora
>> 16).   Katello 1.2 was released with upgrade instructions, but they did
>> not cover upgrading from Fedora 16 to Fedora 17 (so i am going to assume
>> it was not supported or tested).  So keep in mind today that we really
>> do not have an official policy on upgrading across fedora versions.
>>
>> Due to the volatile nature of Fedora upgrades (especially going from
>> fedora 16 to fedora 18 which uses two different upgrade mechanisms), I
>> am proposing to only support upgrades to from Katello 1.2 to 1.3 on 
>> RHEL 6.
>>
>> What are people's thoughts on that?
>>
>>
>> Katello 1.3 is somewhat special in that katello 1.2 and 1.3 do not share
>> a fedora version in common, but going forward what are thoughts around
>> either:
>>
>> a) Not supporting upgrades on fedora at all, only supported on RHEL 6
>> and CentOS 6.
>> b) Not supporting upgrades from/to different versions of fedora (i.e.
>> Katello 1.X to 1.Y is supported on Fedora N, but not from N to N+1)
>> c) Only supporting upgrades from/to different versions of fedora via
>> backup/import of data and certs.
>
> <quibbler>
>     We are not supporting anything :)
> </quibbler>
>
<snarky>
   Oh we aren't supporting anything?   Why do we continue to release 
software? fix bugs?  have an irc channel?  Have mailing lists?  Lets 
shut it all down!!
</snarky>

<reality>
    If we do not plan to support the software we ship in the community 
then should shut it down now and concede that we will never succeed.  
You might have a different definition of what support means, but for an 
open source project it means the following:

   - Backport major bug fixes to minor releases
   - Fix security releases in major and minor releases
   - Help users with issues through reasonable channels (irc, mailing list)

We haven't really done the 1st item because we really don't have many 
users yet to report major issues.  We haven't done the 2nd item because 
we haven't really had any reported security vulnerabilities against our 
code.  In a recent security vulnerability, our internal security group 
asked if the issue was in a released version of katello and they were 
very concerned if it was (it was not).

Think about any popular open source project, they all do the above three 
items.  There is no reason we shouldn't as well.

</reality>

I think you may misunderstand the meaning of 'support' within an open 
source software community.  YES we do support something, if we don't 
then we we should never plan on having any users.


> Yes we have to support upgrades on RHEL6. I would suggest to not 
> explicitly test CentOS unless there is direct report that it differ 
> from RHEL6 - i.e. that something is broken on Centos while it work on 
> RHEL.
There is a direct report, and i don't think its too hard to test a 
simple install for each katello release.  We could then list this as a 
supported platform.

>
> I would like to have keep at least one Fedora version in common in 
> future. And threat this upgrade as exception.
> And upgrade from Katello 1.2 to 1.3 support using backup/restore. And 
> try to promise that in future we will do our best to have one version 
> in common.

Why?  I outlined a case for not doing so, that to me makes perfect 
logical sense.  I don't want us to do things for the sake of doing 
things when no one is going to use them.   So at least provide some 
reasoning?   I was hoping a user would reply and say "I would use this", 
or "I wouldn't use this", but so far they have not.  If they do not then 
why support & test it?

-Justin





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