2009-01-07
Two suggestions for improving Fedora's PreUpgrade experience
Having just gone through a PreUpgrade experience (updating from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, yes I am behind the times), I have two suggestions for how the whole experience could be made even nicer.
First, there should be an option to apply the current updates for the
new distro version as part of the upgrade process, or at least to
download them all in advance so that when I reboot and immediately do a
yum update, I do not then have to sit around as my machine downloads
another gigabyte. The nice implementation of this would merge the
updates into the base install, but that might complicate Anaconda's and
PreUpgrade's life too much. The ideal implementation would be capable
getting updates from well known third-party repositories as well, so
that you had exactly the RPMs that a post-reboot yum update would
install.
(In fact, all installers should offer this option on Internet-connected machines. The very first thing I want newly installed machines to do is to get current on security patches, and doing it before they reboot and become live is better than doing it afterwards. I am willing to sit around in the installer waiting for the downloads, since I am only going to do this afterwards anyways.)
Second, make the upgrade environment a LiveCD environment, so that I can still do things while I am waiting for the upgrade to complete. LiveCDs are a great idea for all sorts of reasons but especially so during upgrades, which otherwise take your machine away from you when you had previously been productively using it. As it is, I can tell that I am going to be taking a long walk or two when I upgrade my home machine.
(I will also have to figure out how to avoid having the machine automatically reboot at the end of the upgrade process, since I am a bit nervous about upgraded machines coming up live without me around to watch them.)
Yes, I am aware that perhaps I should just get over my cautions and do a live yum upgrade. Maybe next time.
(The drawback of live yum upgrades is that it's much more complicated to download all of the necessary RPMs in advance, so that your machine does not spend a day and a half fetching things. I suppose that this is a good reason to figure out how to set up and use local yum repository mirrors.)