Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 87956
Redhat 9 un-user-friendly for upgrades from Pink Tie etc.
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:52:45 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030313 Description of problem: When Redhat 9 is booted from CD, it fails to detect an existing Linux install if /etc/issue has been changed (it's changed in PinkTie, for example, but many sys admins change /etc/issue), and so only offers install as an option. There is no visible way to upgrade. Now section 3.15 of the manual and Appendix H do explain how to get around this problem. But it's bad PR to make expert users have to read the manual for an extremely common problem that is new in Redhat 9. A few words on the screen should be plenty. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. change /etc/issue 2. boot from ISO 3. note lack of upgrade choice Additional info:
And it's also mentioned in the release notes. Unfortunately, the only real way to tell what a system has installed is /etc/redhat-release. If the contents of the file don't match the distribution you're installing, we don't show it as an upgrade by default as otherwise, we'd start showing Mandrake and other partitions as upgradable, when they aren't.
Well, damn, I'm just stunned that a modest change to significantly raise ease-of-use for experts is not of interest. At least I now know to not waste my time filing bugs.
When the tradeoff is between a) confuse users by offering to upgrade things that we can't upgrade and b) confuse users who aren't using our official product by making them use a command line option to get the upgrade check to work then it's a lose-lose situation either way. Unfortunately, this is a case where erring on the side of caution has to be the approach taken.
If that was the choice, I'd agree. However, it seems to me that more information is an easy thing to add, instead of mysteriously not offering an upgrade option. How about: "I can't find an existing Redhat install. If you think I should have found one, please see section XXX of the manual." That is 1000% better than simply not offering an upgrade option.