Description of problem: I tried to update to FC6 a small "internal" server which so far was happy with RHL 7.2. All attempts ended up with an error like the one quoted in summary. This was happening while anaconda was trying to inventory packages to install. Full anacdump.txt dumped by anaconda attached. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): anaconda like provided on FC6 installation images How reproducible: always
Created attachment 145137 [details] crash information as dumped by anaconda
Were you trying to upgrade a RHL 7.2 system to FC-6? If so, that's not supported. We can only guarantee previous Fedora releases upgradeable to the current one. So, FC-5 to FC-6 works. RHL 7.2 to FC-6 definitely won't work.
> Were you trying to upgrade a RHL 7.2 system to FC-6? Yes, like I said. > If so, that's not supported. Supported or not supported but Python errors from anaconda seems like not something what should happen. > We can only guarantee previous Fedora releases upgradeable > to the current one. This is _far_ too little in the real life. Besides in the past there were really no problems with skipping few releases. Granted, what I tried was somewhat extreme but in any case one would think that anaconda runs in an evironment of an installation image so why it should care about a status of its target?
You're right, most people don't install each new release. Some effort is made to see if upgrades work from 2 releases back, but there are so many other factors that go in to it. Sometimes it's impossible to do a smooth upgrade. Anaconda cares about the target system because it needs to know the possible set of packages there and account for obsoletes and entirely new packages. That happens a lot. We can probably do a better job of telling the user that upgrading their very old installation to this release won't work, rather than dumping the traceback.
Closing this as WONTFIX because we cannot keep knowledge of past releases in anaconda forever. FC releases change a lot from release to release and that's hard enough to guarantee upgrades.