From: "doug piper" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I realize that what you are saying is right on but I have a hard time believing > that Linux people would be so forgetting of what was happening a year to a > year and a half ago. This seems like the ultimate of the Microsoft philisophy, > i.e. f**k them if they did upgrade and if they didn't upgrade then f**k them > doubly..
The reason I'm suggesting this is because I'm more of a realist than an optomist. I manage systems for a living for which I *always* do an upgrade and never a fresh install. However, these are commercial high-end systems and we pay the vendors a *lot* of money to ensure that upgrades go smoothly, and even then I've seen upgrades have issues. Red Hat, on the other hand, will certainly try hard to ensure that upgrades work, but I realize that they can't afford to freeze the products, beta test for a year, and then finally release - by then, they'd be a year behind their competition and we'd all be screaming at them for not being current. They have tough tradeoffs to make between being current, testing, working on their installers, and supporting upgrades from heavily customized configurations with applications from dozens of independent developers. Couple that with the differing requirements of the releases you've coming from and going to - there are different swap size requirements between the 2.2 kernel in 6.0 and the 2.4 kernel in 7.2, and you don't really have the opportunity to repartition in the middle of the upgrade. All this really puts Red Hat between a rock and a hard place... Makes me kinda glad I don't work in their installer team :-) FWIW, I did an upgrade from Win2K to XP Pro yesterday (against the advice of several experienced Windows people). I watched it blue screen in the middle of the install, restart the install, blue screen, restart, etc. One driver was enough to throw the installer in for a loop. It took me a couple of hours to get past this step. Upgrades are always going to be a lot harder than installs and sometimes we get away with them and sometimes we don't. That's an unfortunate fact of life. All this said, I'm an ornery SOB and if a vendor says that a certain upgrade path is supposed to work, then darn it all, it better work or I feel I have a legitimate right to complain. I wouldn't complain, though, if Red Hat said only upgrades from 7.0 or 7.1 to 7.2 were supported, but others would not like this restriction. Ed Wilts Mounds View, MN, USA mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
