Tom and Chris,

I don't have the reference off hand, but I believe the recommendation of 
reinstalling and not upgrading was from RHEL3 to RHEL4 because of the kernel 
going from 2.4.x to 2.6.x.  It may have been in the release notes.  However, it 
was only recommended to reinstall, it didn't say you couldn't.

--
Joseph Olt


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Tom Sightler
Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 4:02 PM
To: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) discussion mailing-list
Subject: Re: [rhelv5-list] Whither RHEL6?

On Tue, 2010-02-09 at 12:35 -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Tom Sightler <[email protected]> said:
> > I don't understand this part.  You can certainly do 5.0 -> 5.1 style
> > upgrades "in-place", and you can upgrade between major versions using
> > boot media (either net boot, CD, whatever) if you wish, no requirement
> > to format the drive.
> 
> According to the Red Hat docs, you can upgrade that way, but it is not a
> supported upgrade path.  To me, that means they don't test it (or at
> least not much), so I can't expect it to work on a production system.
> If it breaks part of the way through, or installs a bogus package set,
> etc., I'm stuck with a busted system and no path back to a working
> system but to wipe and restore from backups.

I'm curious what Redhat documentation says that?  Here's a link to some
RHEL5 documentation regarding upgrade:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Installation_Guide/ch-upgrade-x86.html

The first line:

        While upgrading from Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4 Update 4
        is supported, you are more likely to have a consistent
        experience by backing up your data and then installing this
        release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 over your previous Red
        Hat Enterprise Linux installation. 

So what they're saying is that a clean install will give you the best
possible/cleanest experience.  That's a true statement pretty much no
matter the OS, but upgrading is supported.  Obviously they can't be 100%
sure that you might have a setup which, someway, somehow, breaks
anaconda from being able to complete an upgrade, as there are infinite
number of combinations of hardware, but they test it and it generally
works and is supported.

Later,
Tom


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