[CentOS-devel] EL6 to EL7 Update Tool and Maintenance

[Peter]

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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
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