How Easy Is It To Upgrade Fedora Versions

[jsmidt]

How difficult/safe it it to upgrade between Fedora Versions, say between F6 and F7? I am used to Debian based distros where this is fairly safe. I just want to know what I may be in for.

Second, if it isn't safe, is this something the Fedora devs are working on? I would like to keep my system up to date without always having to start from scratch.

[rod]

best option is starting with a fresh install, i also find it good for keeping things ordered and the system clean. plus i made an install script i'm about to try with everything i need.

[William Haller]

I have upgraded all the way from FC1 on. It has worked fine. There are the usual caveats as with any upgrade...

1) Read the release notes to see if anything is going to bite you. For example, they switched from using a IDE to a pseudo SCSI driver between 6 and 7, I believe. You had to change some device names in the fstab before upgrading.

2) When the upgrade is complete, do a listing of the RPMs that were upgraded to see what you may have installed from another source that may need upgraded.

3) Search the /etc directory for any file with a suffix of .rpmnew, .rpmold, .rpmsave (.rpm*) and either update settings in your current configuration with those in a new file, or migrate changes you've made in your old configuration (old/save) to the new configuration.

4) Go through the new packages that are available. You won't always get all new features loaded with an upgrade as it just upgrades what you have installed (after satisfying dependencies). I like apt/synaptic to see what is out there, but F8 promises some new shiny features for their package manager, so I'll probably give that a try before going back to apt/synaptic.

Fresh might be cleanest, but upgrade generally works OK and is a lot less hassle if you are running servers with a lot of configuration tweaking.

As with all install/upgrade advice, back your system up before you start anything, and make sure the backup is good!

Best wishes.