Purgatory: RH9 -> FC1

[Michael Hipp]

Net Llama! wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Michael Hipp wrote:
> 
>>To make a long story long ...
>>
>>My local server is bad in need of upgrading and I decided to do it by
>>the cli/network method rather than using the disks since I have several
>>more to do after this and most are some considerable distance from here.
>>
>>I tried upgrading RH9 -> FC3 but that appears nigh impossible. So I
> 
> 
> Impossible how/why?

It started when yum wouldn't run. I noticed then that the FC3 yum had 
been installed to python2.3 when RH9 only has python2.2. So I copied yum 
over to 2.2 and it runs but gives occasional tracebacks and can't quite 
seem to ever complete anything. Just exits with no error message before 
actually installing anything. And it was crashing on a message about 
kernel < udev. So I looked to upgrade python to 2.3 from the FC3 
repository but the dependency list read like a phone book (including 
such minor things as glibc). There is also a hint of an rpm version 
problem that required a long dependency list. And no guarantee that 
either upgrade would succeed or run.

So I chickened out given that attempting to follow those rat holes might 
have gained me a box that was in a limbo state of partially upgraded but 
no way to finish. Seems the much safer path to find some way to do a 
whole upgrade or not at all.

Any thoughts welcome.

>>Can someone offer some advice? (Something other than comments about the
>>ancestry and mating habits of RPM distros - which, at the moment, I have
>>no comeback for). I've got several more RH9 boxes and one RH7.3 that
>>will have to be put through this soon also.
>>
>>It's possible that this whole problem was caused by my installing a
>>bunch of stuff from Fedora Legacy. The other boxes don't have that problem.
> 
> 
> That seems likely.  I doubt Fedora has any understanding of the legacy
> packages.

Yes. And even worse, it appears FL tactics include a mixture of 
backporting and supplying latest packages. So in some cases it appeared 
I already had a FC3 version of certain packages installed and yum just 
couldn't handle that. Probably due in part to what appears to be a 
different versioning scheme.

Your earlier advice about avoiding FL would likely have saved me some 
headaches had I asked sooner. Live and learn.

Michael