Bug 186762 - installer's upgrade doesn't add packages that are new in the new version
Summary: installer's upgrade doesn't add packages that are new in the new version
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED CANTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: anaconda
Version: 5
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Anaconda Maintenance Team
QA Contact: Mike McLean
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2006-03-26 07:14 UTC by David Baron
Modified: 2007-11-30 22:11 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2006-03-27 18:21:07 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


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Description David Baron 2006-03-26 07:14:15 UTC
When using the installer (e.g., from DVD) to upgrade from a previous version of
Fedora, packages that are part of the default install in the new version, but
were not part of previous versions, are generally not installed.  This causes
users who upgrade but don't manually go through and add packages to miss many of
the new features in the new version.  (And, frankly, it's one of the reasons
that installing and using Fedora isn't something that the average user can do
properly.)

What I've done through many previous upgrades is go through comps.xml, figure
out which groups are part of what I install, and add all the packages that are
mandatory or default in those groups.  But I really shouldn't have to do this.

Instead, the installer should have some notion of what groups I've chosen to
install and should add, or at least offer to add, the new packages available in
those groups.

In Fedora Core 5, some of these packages were a pretty big deal, such as
gnome-power-manager, hplip, and beagle, among others.  In Fedora Core 3, they
included the SELinux packages, bluez-*, prelink, redhat-lsb, and rhgb.  (I've
done similar things for other upgrades, but didn't save the list.)  Users who
upgrade shouldn't miss the important new features, but by default they often do.

Comment 1 Jeremy Katz 2006-03-27 18:21:07 UTC
An upgrade fundamentally cannot provide an identical experience to a fresh
install as there are some things which have to be done at filesystem creation
time.  We pull in packages that are required, but going beyond that is hard. 
Think about the case where a user, eg, removes something like the bluetooth
utilities because they don't have bluetooth hardware.  Having that come back
every time they do an upgrade is also not good.  So there's not really a way to
do this that doesn't have downsides. 

Comment 2 David Baron 2006-03-28 01:10:46 UTC
If the goal is to have an operating system that normal people can use, then you
may have to sacrifice some of the things geeks want.  Frankly, though, I think
this use case is much more important than not reinstalling a single package that
the user removed.  And if the user removed a large group of packages, maybe
there's a deficiency in the package grouping?

I'd agree that it may be hard to fix this bug well, but I disagree that that
means nobody should try.

There are lots of sources of useful information to do this well: the history of
what the user originally installed and how they selected that set (e.g.,
accepting defaults or picking packages), what they added/removed, what
proportion of each group in the old version is currently installed on the
system, how the installation defaults changed between versions, etc.


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