Andreas Girardet wrote:
Update should support this - but it's completely untested.
Getting updates working from one major release to another (9.3 to 10.0) is already a problem, getting updates working from one beta to the other is nearly impossible. Nevertheless some of us do and it works most of the time...
Hello Andreas
Personally I never had an issue, since I prefer a clean install anyhow, but some people on a Linux Roadshow we had recently pointed out that they keep having issues upgrading.
What can be done to get this going better? In my experience it requires a lot of testing and retrofitting of rpm's to make sure that things just work from one release to another. Using apt for that is great, since apt is very picky about differences in rpm's and will complain big time. Of course any custom changes or self rolled rpm's would break, but in general a straight upgrade path has to work.
Whilst with Lycoris, we were required to ensure that all and any rpm would clean upgrade from the current stable to the current beta during our development cycle. We did not test beta to beta has this was testing a case that would never be tested by the customer. I personally prefer the clean install approach when shifting versions, however, not everyone can afford this. It should be an active design and development goal to ensure a clean upgrade path. Cheers Mike