[CentOS] 4.4 upgrade problems

Tue Sep 5 12:46:45 UTC 2006
Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com>

OK ... there has been an awful lot of attributing problems to the 4.4
upgrade that are not really upgrade problems.

The best I can tell there is really only one major problem:

1.  You need to install python-sqlite before sqlite (or at nearly the
same time).

To accomplish this you can do this:

yum update python-sqlite sqlite

Then after that, a normal yum update works fine.

There are 2 other potential problems

2.  There are other (hardware specific issues) concerning the 2.6.9-42
(or 42.0.2) kernel and some users.  This is going to happen every kernel
upgrade cycle.

3.  There are sometimes futex issues ... that is a generic error that
can be caused by many things, usually it is a somehow messed up rpm
database with double RPMS installed or another problem.  Maybe sometimes
it just happens, it has been so since at least RH8.

Other than that, I don't see any other problems. (Except that some
people have more than 1 version of an RPM in their rpm database ... and
when they try to update now, there is a version conflict.)

I have now upgraded 30 production servers and several dozen workstations
and have had no problems at all.

Some people are creating their own issues by doing piecemeal
upgrades ... that is to be expected.

CentOS does not control how the upstream provider releases its product
(there are 195 packages updated, for example), nor do we control when
the release stuff or what they build it on.  I can tell you, however
that some things do not work with older releases ... though they are not
necessarily listed as requirements.  An example is audit and the audit
libs.  They don't work properly with all released kernels.

A CentOS-4.x update is CentOS-4 ... CentOS-4.4 is a point in time
snapshot ... nothing more.  Installing CentOS-4.2 (as an example) and
only doing security updates after that is not tested as working or
recommended (by CentOS or by the upstream provider). 

As Lance said, in the future the upstream provider is going to create
different channels for different snapshots and when they do, we will as
well (4.5.0, 4.5.1, 4.5.2, etc.).  Until that time (just like upstream),
there is only a authorized CentOS-4 version ... and it is CentOS-4.x
installed and all the updates applied.

----------------------------------------------

There was also a comment that these issues on not on the upstream
mailing list so they must be happening only on CentOS. This is also not
true.  The upstream provider tells everyone to "Handle it via Support
Calls" and not the Mailing List ... and sometimes not even via the
public bugzilla.  As an example see this:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/anaconda-devel-list/2006-August/msg00073.html

Then they create proprietary (non public) bugzilla entries to track and
fix issues.  That is their prerogative, however because of that not all
fixes are done in public view.

We try to move these things also into the public view (again ... in the
above example):

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=202446

To assume that just because something is not on the upstream mailing
list or upstream public bugzilla that it is not a known upstream issue
and being worked upstream is incorrect.

The python-sqlite issue is not an upstream issue ... as they don't use
yum or sqlite ... however all other issues I have seen are.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes
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