[CentOS] upgrading from CentOS 7 to 8

Alessandro Baggi alessandro.baggi at gmail.com
Wed Oct 2 13:29:41 UTC 2019


On 01/10/19 23:38, Liam O'Toole wrote:
> On Tue, 01 Oct, 2019 at 13:57:19 -0400, MAILIST wrote:
>> After 40 years of upgrading many different operating systems,
>> Windows (from 3.1 to 10), CentOS 6 to 8, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat,
>> AT&T Unix, VAX VMS; I have never observed an upgrade from one major
>> version to the next to work.  The last one I tried using their "upgrade
>> process" was Ubuntu 18 to 19.  Didn't work.
> 
> I've been running Debian stable on various machines over the course of
> about 17 years. I have *never* had to reinstall.
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Hi to all members,
I never upgraded from major to major, always preferred a new install by 
default. In the last months I'm seeing upgrade between major release 
under another view.

CentOS does not support (at least C7) the upgrade to 8 and I think that 
will remain so for many years. First of all I think that if we can 
upgrade from major to major, 10 years of support would not be needed but 
I think also that the mainstream supports releases for 10 years to avoid 
this type of problem (upgrade between major release).

For a distro like CentOS,Fedora,Debian,OpenSUSE (based on community) 
there would be no problem, without support you are alone and you could 
do all what you want: You broke your server? It's a your problem.

Also if I never upgraded to a new major release (like in fedora, debian, 
ubuntu) I think that the to perform a successfull upgrade you must avoid 
to install third party repo, app, custom rpm and so on: you need to stay 
as much as possible in the repositories and CentOS has a small 
repository (in fact we need EPEL that is considered third repo). 
Consider also the great changes between each centos release. In this 
release we get podman, nftables, appstreams, many packages removed and 
others changed version and other. Those are big changes. How the system 
will reacts to this?

For example my C7 workstation have kde plasma 4 installed. What would 
happen if I upgrade to C8 when kde is deprecated on EL8? I could have a 
no working workstation and this could be a problem. This is a stupid 
example, take for example the change from docket to podman, or better an 
external rpm compiled for C7 and try to run on 8. A pita.

Now, for a moment, imagine that RH will permit upgrade between major 
releases. Every supported customers probably would be need support for 
this process. Considering also that every customer could have his 
packages etc, how can RH support manage this? It's too risky when you 
have corps as customers.

best regards.


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