[ale] Red Hat upgrades?

[James Sumners]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at water.com> wrote:
> +1
>
> So far as I know RHEL doesn't have an upgrade path between major
> releases.  You can upgrade RHEL5.4 to RHEL5.6 simply by doing "yum
> update" but I don't know of a method to go from RHEL5.6 to RHEL6.0
> without doing a reinstall.

Such a thing astonishes me. There are plenty of other, _free_,
distributions that have solved this problem. It makes no sense to me
that the premier paid distribution would be broken in this way.

> Based on experience years ago with a well planned upgrade between major
> releases of a commercial UNIX I decided it was never worth the effort
> because:
> 1)  There is always something you didn't plan for.
> 2)  Much cruft behind from the old release that you're never quite sure
> it is safe to remove.
> It is much simpler to do a fresh install (ideally to a new machine) and
> migrate applications over.   The other benefit to this is there is a
> clean backout (i.e. using the old server) if the new environment has
> issues.

It will _not_ be easier for me to upgrade in this manner. The design
of the application makes this prohibitive.


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

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