On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 13:51 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Adam Jackson (ajackson(a)redhat.com) said:
> The received wisdom seems to be "Only care about upgrades with stride <=
> 2", meaning, FC5 to F7 should work, but FC1 to F7 is madness. Is this
> written down anywhere, or just tribal knowledge?
>
> I ask because there's a fair bit of cruft in the X packages to handle
> things like Obsoletes: XFree86. We haven't shipped that since FC2, so
> it's hard to still care.
>
> I also don't know how closely this is tied to RHEL construction. So
> far, RHELs have been issued every other Fedora, so that might be the
> source of the "stride 2" idea. Maybe that won't be true in the
future?
Technically, it's not quite true now. RHEL 3 =~ RHL9/FC1, RHEL 4 =~ FC 3,
RHEL 5 =~ FC 6.
Historically, we've supported upgrades from N-2 on the premise that that's
what's reasonable to test and make sure works; moreover, with the slightly
extended lifecycle, someone can be on a maintained FC5 installation when
F7 is released. Anything other than that is gravy. There hasn't been specific
policy about garbage collecting obsoletes, to the the best of my knowledge.
Strawman would be if we're supporting N-2, to garbage collect after N-4?
That sounds reasonable to me. Stride 4 would mean two years to learn a
new name and/or upgrade, which seems plausible.
Just to be sure we're interpreting this the same way: X was provided by
xorg-x11 in FC-4, but modular packages in FC-5. My interpretation of
N-4 would be that the Prov/Obs for xorg-x11 could then be removed in the
rawhide cycle between F-8 and F-9.
- ajax