More Reliable Upgrades Hoped For With Fedora 23

Written by Michael Larabel in Fedora on 29 July 2015 at 06:50 PM EDT. 10 Comments
FEDORA
It looks like reworking the Fedup upgrade tool may still happen for Fedora 23. The upgrade to this upgrade tool would involve relying on DNF and systemd functionality to provide more reliable Fedora system upgrades.

Earlier this year was talk of replacing Fedup in Fedora 23 to overcome existing problems with this upgrade tool that's been affected by issues in the past. Because of Fedup reliability concerns is also why I haven't upgraded to Fedora 22 on my main workstation over Fedup frights.

While the change checkpoint completion deadline passed this week, there's the new DNF System Upgrades proposal now on the Fedora Wiki.
While fedup worked well in many circumstances, there were a lot of problems resulting from using upgrade.img. This has caused nasty, hard-to-debug blocker bugs for every release since it was introduced.

It turns out that upgrade.img was relying on some undocumented, unsupported systemd behavior. After F22 this was discussed on the systemd-devel mailing list, and the conclusion was that fedup's boot behavior is broken by design, and systemd can't (and won't) continue to support it.

systemd already supports a simpler, more reliable method for performing Offline System Updates; the systemd team suggests using that to perform system upgrades.

Most of the remaining problems with fedup were caused by the fact that it was separate from the system packaging tools, and therefore had slight (and confusing) differences from the normal package update mechanisms.

Therefore, we propose that system upgrades should be handled by the system packaging tools, using systemd's Offline System Updates facility.

dnf-plugin-fedup is a proof-of-concept implementation; we propose to integrate support for this into DNF itself.
Let's hope this gets all finished up and vetted ahead of the Fedora 23 release in October.
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