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

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
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