On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Mark Mielke wrote: >Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2004 22:06:45 -0500 >From: Mark Mielke <mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> >Reply-To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx >To: "Neil Derraugh (UW)" <naderrau@xxxxxxxxxxxx> >Cc: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx >Subject: Re: Why FC-2? > >On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 07:15:01PM -0500, Neil Derraugh (UW) wrote: >> Timothy Murphy wrote: >> >I'm not entirely clear why it is necessary to have a new distribution. >> >There doesn't seem anything very revolutionary in it, >> >so why not just go on upgrading FC-1? >> I concur. And iterate the idea of upgrading FC-1. > >You concur without expressing your reasons? > >I don't see why we *wouldn't* have major releases, or at *least* minor >releases. Without releases, we don't have any baselines to work from. > >mark > > In my experience, a fresh reinstall is generally better than an upgrade. I prefer to : o backup data o wipe out OS o remake filesystems o install new system o apply local config and app management from central mgmt server o restore data Data backup and restore can be mitigated by good choice for data bearing filesystems (e.g. a separate /home or /export) Now for the home user this may not be an option, but it's a tried and well tested formula for most commercial sysadmins. Specifically tho, the build process and configuration process need to be well tested and understood. When you deply hundreds of identical systems, investing time in doing this is worthwhile. The question then becomes of course; at what point should incremental upgrades be deferred in place of a complete release. That often seems to be a decision best left to the core development team for an OS. At some stage it becomes problematic to continue to upgrade an older OS, so a reinstall to a new major release is a good choice. That said, I haven't examined the difference between FC1 and FC2 (altho I'm given to understand FC2 is based on 2.6 kernel stream ?) so I can't make a judgement on whether the right choice was made. Given the rapid pace of development on fedora in the last few months, I'm guessing that moving to FC2 is probably 'A Good Thing'. Cheers, Al
