[Rpm-ecosystem] System upgrades in general (was Re: Fedora system upgrades in DNF)

[Kamil Paral]

> > As zbyszek pointed out, current dnf-plugin-fedup has a "--distro
> > -sync"
> > flag for this. So changing the default behavior is technically
> > trivial.
> > 
> > Choosing the *best* default is a question of policy and best
> > practices.
> > 
> > So: what do other distros do? And what should Fedora's policy be?
> > 
> 
> I'm not sure what other distros do, but I'm inclined to suggest that
> Fedora's policy be to do the distro-sync.
> 
> Downgrade data incompatibilities are quite rare. Generally, such things
> would only occur during a distribution upgrade anyway (in which case
> it's an upgrade and everything should be fine). Contrarily, we have had
> many issues in the past related to updates getting pushed stable in
> Fedora N while Fedora N+1 is in Freeze, resulting in the upgrade
> process having difficulty. But as long as Fedora N+1 passes
> repoclosure, distro-syncing to it should be mostly safe.
> 
> So my vote would be towards the distro-sync, but I'm certainly open to
> hearing good arguments to the contrary.

>From my Fedora QA experience, I very much support Stephen here. Due to 
release freezes, we desync the package versions very often and we fight 
with upgrade path issues almost constantly. distro-sync by default 
would help us tremendously. I haven't yet seen a data incompatibility
issue related to this.