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.
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