Hi! I don't know if it has been requested before, but I could not find any bug regarding this in Bugzilla, so here we go. I'm a RH/FC user since RH9 and I'm really stuck to this great OS. However, what bugs me a bit is that I need to do a lot manual work to upgrade from one version onto another. I could, of course, use yum to make a dist-upgrade and get all needed packages installed, but this is not only ugly, but it requires doing things in the proper order (e.g. updating the release package at first, ...), and it probably doesn't do any magic Anaconda does when the "Upgrade" option is selected from the real installer screen. I usually update via network, so downloading and burning a full set of CD's or even DVD's (I don't own a DVD burner) is no option for me, since they contain many things I'll never need. Furthermore, the current procedure forces to reboot into the installer system before the actual installation starts, thus Anaconda again needs to get all info about my network setup before the network upgrade procedure even starts. For the procedure itself, the system is several hours unusable since it has to download everything first, and even on a 2MBit connection this takes some time. So what I'm dreaming about (and what would be really, really nice) is some kind of graphical installer, which recognizes and uses the current settings of my installation (network, distro, ...) and already starts downloading the selected packages *before* it reboots. This way, I can continue to work on my old installation until it becomes necessary to reboot into the new distro and do the final upgrade/installation tasks. Ideally such a GUI installer would work on any Linux distro - but this will be probably not possible because of library dependencies, or the installer and all other needed things are statically linked and therefor execute as-is (still platform-specific, though). Maybe even Xen could be used for the installer? What about loading the installer into another Xen client instance, which then gets somehow the ability to communicate with the host to do all tasks? I have absolutely no idea if and how all this should work out, I just think it would be a very good addition to make FC even more desktop-aware. And furthermore, maybe even a Win32 binary of the GUI installer could be provided which would allow a forlorn Windows user to switch easily to a dual-boot / single-Linux-boot installation, without that this user would have to download and burn LiveCD's? Damn me, but wouldn't that be really, really cool?! Thomas.
The reason we do upgrades in the anaconda environment is due to the large number of times that an upgrade actually requires newer kernel features and the newer kernel also requires a newer userspace. Which makes updating on the live system extremely difficult or impossible