[CentOS] Is it okay?

[Les Mikesell]

On 1/20/2011 12:58 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
>
>>> mechanism has been improved at least between F13 and F14, as I did do a
>>> preupgrade on my development/testing box, which will likely go to CentOS 6
>>> or SL6 some time RSN.
>> <snip>
>> Could you define "improved"? My wish list would include "I (fedora) will
>> install the o/s in /boot, and then *ask* where you want the rest to go",
>> so I can tell something like /upgrade in the root filesystem, where I've
>> got a *TON* more space.
>
> Well, since you asked, I'm talking again about a preupgrade; the /boot filesystem on that box is 100MB in size, and the preupgrade worked.  It downloaded the install image during the boot of the anaconda upgrader, rather than downloading during the preupgrade run.  I don't know which BZ entry it would be, but I'm sure you could look that up.
>
> The preupgrade by definition is an in-place upgrade rather than an install.  The LiveCD install cannot upgrade (since it's just really duplicating the on-cd filesystem, plus a few other operations) and there aren't any RPMs on the LiveCD to do an upgrade with.... Having the netinstall option should also give the upgrade option, but I don't recall if the Fedora LiveCD will do a netinstall like the CentOS LiveCD will.
>
> But upgrades between EL versions aren't supported, so that's sort of moot.  Can you imagine trying to upgrade an FC6 to an F12 in one step?  That's essentially what a C5 to C6 upgrade will be like, and it's not going to be easy.  And it may not even be directly possible to upgrade; there have been a lot of changes between, including RPM format, disk naming, among a few things.  It might be possible to do C5 to F7, to F8, to F9, to F10, to F11, and then to C6.  It might even be possible to skip some of those steps; don't know.

In all this talk about the tradeoffs among different distros where 
frequent updates have been mentioned as a downside for some, no one has 
been very specific about which ones can be expected to do in-place major 
upgrades without breaking too much.  I was pleasantly surprised when an 
old ubuntu 8.04LTS offered to upgrade itself to 10.04, and did it, but I 
didn't have anything complicated set up on it to know how well this is 
really handled.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com