[Mageia-dev] ANN: Upgrading from Mageia 2 via urpmi

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Thomas Spuhler at 08/12/12 22:51 did gyre and gimble:
> On Sunday, November 18, 2012 09:37:43 AM Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> As many of you know, upgrading from Mageia 2 is somewhat tricky due to
>> the usr move.
>>
>> With Alpha3 comes the ability for the installer to upgrade the
>> filesystem layout, but many of you (myself included) prefer upgrading
>> via urpmi rather than the installer.
>>
>> While this is possible with some manual commands, it's not as trivial a
>> task as it should be - until now!!
>>
>> So I've just pushed the package mageia-prepare-upgrade to mga2
>> core/updates_testing.
>>
>> This package, when installed will add a new menu option to your
>> bootloader. Simply install this package, reboot, select the "Mageia 3
>> Upgrade Preparation" entry boot, wait while your FS is converted and
>> then perform a urpmi upgrade as you would normally.
>>
>> I've not specifically tested the upgrade part, only the installation and
>> creation of the initrd and bootloader entries in grub. I've also not
>> done this on an mga2 machine yet but will do soon enough.
>>
>> I just wanted to get this package "out there" for anyone wanting to
>> update their mga2 machines to mga3 a3 but not wanting to use the installer.
>>
>> At present there are a few limitations:
>>
>> 1. It requires kernel 3.3.8-2.mga2 to be installed (any flavour should
>> work). A specific kernel version is not really 100% necessary but it
>> does mean I can add hard requires to the package. This is only desirable
>> to prevent the situation where users install this upgrade package but do
>> not run it and later remove the kernel used to generate the initrd for
>> the bootloader menu item, thus breaking it. Any smarter ideas on how to
>> manage this welcome.
>>
>> 2. If you have /usr in a separate partition and have it mounted ro in
>> your fstab, you will have to manually change the fstab to rw for the
>> upgrade boot.
>>
>>
>> Happy testing. Let me know if it kills any kittens. Please keep a backup
>> etc. etc.
>>
>> Col
> Thanks Colin.
> The conversion works. But then the problem shows, we have no network.
> doing a urpmi --download-all --auto-update only downloads the fist 120+ rpms (the ones needed before 
> restart-urpmi
> 
> What is needed is to add some directories and then the network will start
> /var/run/netreport
> /var/lock/subsystem/network
> 
> I will check after the upgrade if they can be deleted

Hmm, yes, I guess after doing the upgrade the various /var/run and
/var/lock folders would be nuked. In mga3 they will be created by
tmpfiles but not with a simple reboot on mga2...

Hmm, I wonder how best to do this... perhaps we could ship updated
packages for each of the packages which absolutely *need* this to do the
download... or perhaps we could just ship some essential config tweaks
in the this mageia-prepare-upgrade file. It shouldn't do any harm to do
the latter and it's a bit easier on the QA folk.

Cheers for the report


Col



-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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