Re: Announcing Fedora 7 (Moonshine) (fwd)

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 10:50 -0500, Steven Pritchard wrote:
> Fedora 7 is out.  The attached two messages should give you a good
> idea what has changed.
<snip>

The more things change the more they stay the same. There aren't many
revolutionary changes in what appears to be a fairly predictable,
evolutionary Red Hat 16 release. They've taken a lot of suggestions to
heart:

(1) Distributing one binary DVD image instead of a half dozen CD images.
The source code is also distributed on one DVD image. No signigicant
changes for the Rescue CDs.
(2) Merging what was Core and Extras (more about that in a minute).
(3) Releasing Live 32-bit and 64-bit versions with either GNOME or KDE
to compete with Ubuntu et al.

The so-called "merger" of Core and Extras has necessitated a lot of
changes below the surface, many of which aren't yet ready for prime
time. The most obvious is the directory structure at
http://download.fedora.redhat.com (and its mirrors). From now on you'll
be looking for "Release" rather than "Core" or "Extras". The "Updates"
structure has changed too. I found and downloaded 74 updates
from /pub/fedora/linux/updates/7/x86_64. This differs from FC6 and
before, where updates were in /pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/x86_64
(note "core" is no longer used). I think this may have led to a yum bug
that causes "yum -y update" to fail:

# yum -y update
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Update Process
Could not retrieve mirrorlist http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-7&arch=x86_64 error was
[Errno 4] IOError: <urlopen error (-2, 'Name or service not known')>
Error: Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository: fedora

This problem is common to both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Fedora 7,
each of which installed very routinely as guest operating systems under
VMware Server.

There are other problems, such as the disappearances of well-known and
well-established packages like Brian Masney's gftp which is included in
both RHEL4 and RHEL5. This may be a casualty of the merger of the Core
and Extras source trees.

Those 74 updates cannot be installed using "rpm -Uvh ..." either. There
are many broken dependencies -- so many that it looks more like the
testing tree on a bad day.

At this point I cannot recommend Fedora 7 to anyone as an upgrade to
Fedora Core 6. There are far too many QC issues right now. Perhaps in a
month or two, after they've sorted things out a bit better...

--Doc


-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.