All,
There exists an update tool for moving from CentOS-6 to CentOS-7 .. the tool worked for awhile, but has gone into disrepair. It currently does not work (so don't use it !), but we would like to get it working and maintain it.
The following git trees are involved in the tool:
https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!redhat-upgrade-tool
https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!preupgrade-assistant
https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!preupgrade-assistant-contents
https://git.centos.org/summary/openscap
The effort to keep this operational is a 'community effort' and it requires users from the community to volunteer to keep it functional. People often ask how they can help with the CentOS Project .. if you have the ability, this is one way.
What we need is to get all the modifications that were written for the original test RPMs to be modified to work with the newer versions of the Source code.
The old tree is here:
http://dev.centos.org/centos/6/upg/Source/SPackages/
(Those changes are also in the git trees above)
What we need is for patches to be re-factored and rolled into the new versions of all the packages.
Patches can be submitted to this list as attachments .. a git am format would be best, as applied to the latest version of each package that is imported into git.
We also need maintainers who will track updates to those branches and re-factor and submit patches, also to this list as attachments, when updated source is released.
If we can not find volunteers, we are likely going to have to take down even the testing files, as they do not currently work.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 9:18 AM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
All,
There exists an update tool for moving from CentOS-6 to CentOS-7 .. the tool worked for awhile, but has gone into disrepair. It currently does not work (so don't use it !), but we would like to get it working and maintain it.
The following git trees are involved in the tool:
https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!redhat-upgrade-tool
https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!preupgrade-assistant
https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!preupgrade-assistant-contents
https://git.centos.org/summary/openscap
The effort to keep this operational is a 'community effort' and it requires users from the community to volunteer to keep it functional. People often ask how they can help with the CentOS Project .. if you have the ability, this is one way.
While I might like to have such a tool, even Red Hat strongly discourages this process and urges doing complete re-installations in their release notes for RHEL 7. Is this really the best place to spend the effort?
On 10/02/2015 07:17 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 9:18 AM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
All,
There exists an update tool for moving from CentOS-6 to CentOS-7 .. the tool worked for awhile, but has gone into disrepair. It currently does not work (so don't use it !), but we would like to get it working and maintain it.
The following git trees are involved in the tool:
https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!redhat-upgrade-tool
https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!preupgrade-assistant
https://git.centos.org/summary/rpms!preupgrade-assistant-contents
https://git.centos.org/summary/openscap
The effort to keep this operational is a 'community effort' and it requires users from the community to volunteer to keep it functional. People often ask how they can help with the CentOS Project .. if you have the ability, this is one way.
While I might like to have such a tool, even Red Hat strongly discourages this process and urges doing complete re-installations in their release notes for RHEL 7. Is this really the best place to spend the effort?
Well, that totally depends on if someone wants it. How many of those people exist and if they are willing to make the effort.
I only bring up that IF someone wants it, THEY need to take action to maintain it functioning.
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On 10/03/2015 02:18 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
There exists an update tool for moving from CentOS-6 to CentOS-7 .. the tool worked for awhile, but has gone into disrepair. It currently does not work (so don't use it !), but we would like to get it working and maintain it.
I would like to respectfully disagree with maintaining such a tool. It deceives people into thinking that there is a safe upgrade path from CentOS 6 to 7 when there is not and even with such a tool there will necessarily be a large amount of time and testing on a deployment that will be needed before one can safely switch a box over. This, imo, completely eliminates any gain you could get by using such a tool to upgrade vs simply doing a fresh install and porting your apps and data over because in either case you need a separate physical box, or VM and time and effort to make the change without interruption to existing services.
The only way such a tool could ever make life easier on an admin is if it could do an in-place upgrade on a production server and any server admin who is crazy enough to even attempt such an endeavor should not be allowed anywhere near a server.
You could make the argument that maybe such a tool could be useful for a workstation upgrade, but I find it's much easier and better to just keep a separate /home partition and just do a fresh install without reformatting /home.
This would leave development servers as a potential target for such an upgrade, but what is the point of doing such a monumental task on a development server that you would not do on a production server? Shouldn't you be doing a fresh install like you would be doing on the production server instead?
Did I miss anything or is there a really viable good use for such a tool that would make it worth the monumental effort to maintain it plus the bad karma from enticing lazy admins to try to use it?
That said, if you want my opinion on how to fix it, my understanding is that the current problem with the tool is that there are packages in CentOS 6.7 that have a base version higher than the same packages in CentOS 7.1. My understanding is that yum is able to deal with this with the "distro-sync" command, so why isn't the upgrade tool making use of this functionality?
Peter
On 10/02/2015 08:29 PM, Peter wrote:
On 10/03/2015 02:18 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
There exists an update tool for moving from CentOS-6 to CentOS-7 .. the tool worked for awhile, but has gone into disrepair. It currently does not work (so don't use it !), but we would like to get it working and maintain it.
I would like to respectfully disagree with maintaining such a tool. It deceives people into thinking that there is a safe upgrade path from CentOS 6 to 7 when there is not and even with such a tool there will necessarily be a large amount of time and testing on a deployment that will be needed before one can safely switch a box over. This, imo, completely eliminates any gain you could get by using such a tool to upgrade vs simply doing a fresh install and porting your apps and data over because in either case you need a separate physical box, or VM and time and effort to make the change without interruption to existing services.
I agree with you, on a personal basis. But Red Hat has created the source code for this tool and they maintain it. This source code then just needs to be converted and maintained for CentOS. Whether or not it is useful and worth the effort to maintain is for people who want it to decide.
I have personally stated several times that except for the most basic of installs I would likely never use or recommend this. And in those simple cases, a reinstall would not be very difficult.
I just point out that we had community input to orginally make a working version and if people want it to move forward, we need more community input. If we don't get any, then this functionality will cease to exist.
The only way such a tool could ever make life easier on an admin is if it could do an in-place upgrade on a production server and any server admin who is crazy enough to even attempt such an endeavor should not be allowed anywhere near a server.
You could make the argument that maybe such a tool could be useful for a workstation upgrade, but I find it's much easier and better to just keep a separate /home partition and just do a fresh install without reformatting /home.
This would leave development servers as a potential target for such an upgrade, but what is the point of doing such a monumental task on a development server that you would not do on a production server? Shouldn't you be doing a fresh install like you would be doing on the production server instead?
Did I miss anything or is there a really viable good use for such a tool that would make it worth the monumental effort to maintain it plus the bad karma from enticing lazy admins to try to use it?
That said, if you want my opinion on how to fix it, my understanding is that the current problem with the tool is that there are packages in CentOS 6.7 that have a base version higher than the same packages in CentOS 7.1. My understanding is that yum is able to deal with this with the "distro-sync" command, so why isn't the upgrade tool making use of this functionality?
Peter _______________________________________________ CentOS-devel mailing list CentOS-devel@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel
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Johnny Hughes -
Nico Kadel-Garcia -
Peter