Bug 166705

Summary: Installer doesn't recognize upgradeable installation
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Rene Bauer <rene_falcon>
Component: anacondaAssignee: Anaconda Maintenance Team <anaconda-maint-list>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: Mike McLean <mikem>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 4   
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OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2005-08-25 14:52:47 UTC Type: ---
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Description Rene Bauer 2005-08-24 19:48:26 UTC 
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-DE; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Fedora/1.0.6-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.6

Description of problem:
Note: This is a bug report with solution, so you can close it immediately. Since we found a few obviously related bugs still open, we hope this helps to resolve those bugs.

We were trying to update from a FC2 installation to FC4, but FC4 was unable to find the existing installation. After trying to install with the "upgradeany" option the root partition was found. There was a warning saying /etc/redhat-release could not be found, so we investigated a bit more. The problem is, that on our installation, we dont know why, /etc/redhat-release is an absolute link to /etc/fedora-release. During the install process the current installation is mounted to /mnt/sysimage and then the absolute link can not be resolved and the file is not found by anaconda. The solution is simple, just relink redhat-release relative to fedora-release and everything works as expected.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. boot from FC4 boot cd
2. use text or graphical installer
3. answer the following question until FC tries to find existing installations
  

Actual Results:  Anaconda does not find existing installation and offers only fresh install

Expected Results:  Anaconda finding the existing installation ...

Additional info:

We are not sure but we think the FC2 installation was a clean install, meaning that the absolute link may have been created during the FC2 install.

Since anaconda seems to be only looking for the redhat-release file, it might be better to also look for the fedora-release file if redhat-release can not be found.
Comment 1 Jeremy Katz 2005-08-25 14:52:47 UTC 
Absolute symlinks will screw up a number of things on an upgrade since the root
of the filesystem is mounted under a chroot.  There's, unfortunately, not a lot
that can be done to work around that :(
Comment 2 Rene Bauer 2005-08-25 15:23:09 UTC 
(In reply to comment #1)
> Absolute symlinks will screw up a number of things on an upgrade since the root
> of the filesystem is mounted under a chroot.  There's, unfortunately, not a lot
> that can be done to work around that :(

As I said, wouldn't it be better to not only look for redhat-release, but also
look for fedora-release too, if the redhat-release file can not be found?
Looking at the code this is currently not the case. It is only a few linces of
code in the scripts of anaconda and will save you guys from a lot of strange bug
reports ...

I would also be happy if Red Hat/Fedora could make sure that the absolute
symlink was not actually created by the installer.