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

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Thierry Vignaud at 18/11/12 16:40 did gyre and gimble:
> On 18 November 2012 17:37, Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Cannot you just made dracut/mkinitrd always include it and just
> rebuild initrds so
> that any kernel with work

Well yes, this package installs a dracut config snippet that does always
include the module. The rebuilding of the initrd is just that - a
rebuild under the same name as is always used for the normal kernel -
just with the extra convertfs module added.

However, it requires special kernel command line to trigger the change
and thus the bootloader entry adds the needed params for you.

I'm not sure it would be a good idea to make any boot silently do the
conversion.

>> 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.
> 
> Cannot you just automatically remount / rw?

Yup it would of course be possible, however I'm not sure it's a good
idea. I mean users who have chosen to have both a separate /usr and to
mount it ro by default are undoubtebly in the minority. They likely do
so for very specific reasons. To this end asking them to acknowledge the
change very specifically seems to me like the prudent option, rather
than silently remounting rw for them.

However, if your first point is conceded, you could argue that the user
is very specifically requesting a rw setup anyway and that, to me, is
likely confirmation enough.

So I would likely propose keeping the special menu item, but also
changing the convertfs script such that it can be used with a ro /usr
silently without any manual intervention.


Col



-- 

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

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