[ale] Fedora/CentOS - upgrade or clean install?

[Lightner, Jeff]

I'm not sure what you mean by "change sources".   Fedora/RHEL/CentOS is repository based and (up until the latest Fedora I think) uses yum to do updates from the repositories you've specified.

In general within the version (e.g. RHEL5.x, RHEL6.x, RHEL7.x) you update the minor version (e.g. RHEL5.1 to RHEL5.5) by running yum update.   RHEL hasn't supported doing major version (e.g. RHEL5 to RHEL6) that way so typically you do a reinstall.   However, I learned long ago even for OSes that do have in box major version updates it is better to do the reinstall because:
1)  No matter how much testing you do you'll find there are things you missed in testing that break so doing the "upgrade" didn't really save much effort.
2)  It is a good time to get rid of all the cruft that has built up over time and also avoids both the system and the admins from keeping older things because either they *might* be desired again someday OR because one isn't sure they can be deleted.

RHEL's model unlike many distributions is to use base upstream package versions (e.g. BIND 9.1) then backport bug and security fixes into that base (which they add their own extended versioning to).   By doing this one can go from one minor release to another without usually having things break because they are dependent on the older base version.   To get newer stuff one has to go to the next major release of RHEL.  (Of course you CAN install newer base from upstream source or from one of the many rpm repositories but if you're diverging too much from the RHEL provided stuff there isn't much reason to be using RHEL in the first place.   The main point of RHEL is stability and support.

Fedora is slightly different in that it is used as a test bed so is usually bleeding edge.   What ends up in RHEL (and therefore CentOS) was usually vetted in Fedora first but just because it is in the latest Fedora doesn't mean it will necessary end up in RHEL and if it does it will be a major release.





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Preston
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2014 4:42 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: [ale] Fedora/CentOS - upgrade or clean install?

I am unfamiliar with both Fedora/CentOS (stopped using RH things around it's 7 series).  Is this a distro that you can change sources and upgrade or do you always do a clean install?

Initial searching has been a bit... ambiguous.

Preston

--
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