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

Sun Dec 9 13:18:14 CET 2012

'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
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
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+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+