[CentOS-devel] CentOS/RHEL 5.3

Wed Jan 21 14:19:30 UTC 2009
Dag Wieers <dag at centos.org>

On Wed, 21 Jan 2009, Charlie Brady wrote:

> On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, Alain PORTAL wrote:
>>  Le vendredi 16 janvier 2009, Les Mikesell a ?crit :
>> >  Alain PORTAL wrote:
>> >
>> > >  Are you really sure about that?
>> > 
>> >  It has worked for every CentOS X.Y -> X.Y+1 so far (at least since 3.0
>> >  which was the first I tried).  They do tend to be big updates, though.
>> >  Don't confuse it with an X.Y -> X+1.0 upgrade which can have much bigger
>> >  changes.
>>
>>  No confusion for me.
>>  I understood that upgrading X.Y -> X+1.0 is a bad idea
>
> I don't think it is a bad idea. I just think that sometimes there are some 
> problems, or RedHat is not prepared to say that it will work. CentOS 3 -> 4 
> worked for me, using 'upgradeany' option to anaconda.

Feel surprised to find in the RHEL 5.3 release notes the following 
statement:

----
While anaconda's "upgrade" option will perform an upgrade from
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 or 5.2 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5.3, there is no guarantee that the upgrade will preserve all
of a system's settings, services, and custom configurations.
For this reason, Red Hat recommends that you perform a fresh
installation rather than an upgrade.
----

So they are advising to reinstall RHEL 5.3 even when you're running RHEL 
5.2. Which seems scary to me. I would hope this is mostly because of the 
many Xen improvements and thus mostly for their Advanced Platform.

But still, this is certainly no good evolution.

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at centos.org,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
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