[Technology] Another disappointing upgrade experience

So, sometimes, I'm actually pleased with Fedora upgrades.  Not recently though.  With Fedora 20, I again run into a crippling, opaque problem, which ultimately isn't a huge barrier for me, but I can imagine my friends being lost.



This time, at the time of its release, an appropriate version of fedup (the official upgrade tool) is not available in the Fedora 19 repositories.  You want 0.8, but instead you'll use 0.7, and after downloading a ton of packages, you'll go to restart and then it will fail to upgrade, complaining about things like

-- Unit boot-efi.mount has begun starting up.
            Dec 18 03:14:13 symonia.localdomain mount[768]: mount: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'
            Dec 18 03:14:13 symonia.localdomain systemd[1]: boot-efi.mount mount process exited, code=exited status=32
            Dec 18 03:14:13 symonia.localdomain systemd[1]: Failed to mount /boot/efi.
            -- Subject: Unit boot-efi.mount has failed
            -- Defined-By: systemd
            -- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
            -- 
            -- Unit boot-efi.mount has failed.
            -- 
            -- The result is failed.
            Dec 18 03:14:13 symonia.localdomain systemd[1]: Dependency failed for Local File Systems.
            -- Subject: Unit local-fs.target has failed
            -- Defined-By: systemd
            -- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
            -- 
            -- Unit local-fs.target has failed.
            -- 
            -- The result is dependency.

I mean, if you can even find that in the voluminous journal output once you're on the command-line.



The solution is to update to the version of fedup in the updates-testing repo



# yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing fedup



Then re-run fedup.  However, if you tried with 0.7 first, 0.8 wants to download the packages in a new directory configuration, so you'll end up with 1.5GB of duplicate packages on your system O_O.  So, I hardlinked the ones in the 0.7 directory (/var/lib/fedora_upgrade) into the various repo-specific directories from 0.8 (/var/tmp/system_upgrade/SOMEREPO/packages).  Those directories might not be quite right, as having eventually succeeded in upgrading, the latter one is gone (the former is still around, wasting space, of course).



Why would the current version of fedup at the time of release be non-functioning, when it's the recommended tool for upgrades?  Yeesh.



The relevant bug is here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1044346