On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 14:49 -0500, Bill Chimiak wrote: > I have done some FC5 to FC6 upgrades > by just doing the old > 1. Do a "yum clean all" to remove all the old yum cruft. > 2. Install the fedora-release for Fedora Core 6. Use the rpm > command: > rpm -Uhv > http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/R > PMS/fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm > http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedor > a-release-notes-6-3.noarch.rpm > > 3. Run the yum update: yum -y update. At this point I had to remove > a few packages to get past dependency issues they weren't important > and I just added them back after the update. > > I even did a FC7 to FC8 that way. I was wondering if it would be better to do > a > yum upgrade > > instead. > > I do not know what the --obsoletes really does.
Here's my understanding. "yum update" only replaces a package with a newer one of the same name. However, sometimes Fedora renames, combines, or otherwise rearranges packages in such a way that in the newer distribution, the content you have installed is now found in a package with a different name. The --obsoletes option makes yum do the right thing in these cases using the "Obsoletes" information in the new package. I always use "yum upgrade" in preference to "yum update" to handle package rearrangements; I don't know of any disadvantages of "yum upgrade". Matt
