Hello TJ!
Monday January 01 2024 14:05, TJ wrote to All:
I'm very sorry that your upgrade experience has not been what you
would like. Would that we had the resources to do what you would like,
but we simply do not.
I'm a farmer by trade, and I too use Mageia on my production systems,
mostly one desktop and two laptops, though I do have other systems
that could step in if need be. I use older hardware because it's what
I can afford, and my production needs are probably modest by most of
today's standards. I actually upgraded my production systems to
Cauldron (then Mageia 9) over a year ago, to give them some real-world testing before release.
Yes, it's been a while now, but other than changes to Plasma
introduced by the Friendly Folks at KDE (NOT Mageia) I don't recall
any serious problems getting things up and going. No more than a
couple of hours, including the upgrade itself. There were minor
troubles from time to time afterward, but that's just the nature of Cauldron, as development proceeds. Mageia is never to be considered
stable while in Cauldron.
I kept some Mageia 8 systems around for the purpose of testing updates
while Mageia 8 was still supported. Now that Mageia 8 is officially
EOL, I've been upgrading them one by one. So far, zero issues with the
upgrades. Once they finish, the systems are ready to go.
Last week I did a major hardware upgrade of my production desktop,
different motherboard, processor 5 generations newer, tripling RAM, my
first experience with NVME SSDs, and a Nvidia video card. With such a
large hardware difference, I realized that using the old system might
work but might not, so I backed up /home and my other data by copying
it onto one of the new SSDs, but NOT the / partition. That I installed
new, using the netinstall iso so that I got all the updates in the
process.
Afterward, the new system booted quickly, with no problems whatsoever.
This upgrade did take more time, as I had to re-install things that
weren't part of the basic install, like my HP printers and the
software tools I use as part of the Mageia QA team. Most of one
afternoon, but definitely not WEEKS.
I hope you've stayed with me this far, because here is where I tell
you that every system is different, and comparing my experience with
yours is not particularly valid. But my experience is the only one I
can go on, the only one I can use as I do my volunteer duties with QA.
It's the same with all the rest of us at Mageia, all volunteers who do
this in our spare time, with a limited variety of hardware and
configurations. It is impossible for us to anticipate all possible
situations, so we do the best we can with what we have. It would be
even more difficult to maintain a LTS release, as problems creep in
during its life.
BTW, my time is valuable too, as I am still farming full time, even
though I too "am getting on a bit." (74)
The biggest issue as far as I can see is that the upgrade did NOT update
ALL of the installed packages, most noticeable was the one's relating to
Perl modules and some PHP. The Ruby one's was also excluded but my use of
them as far as I "know" is very limited to put it mildly and like all three used with packages that are used.
On my system that is at least 10 years old now running a Amd fx8350 cpu
that is recorded as a 8 core (Although when a program starts up in a odd numbered core (such as 1) but then processes it in an even core (such as 2)
so the practical is a 4 core as far as I can tell.
Now The system also runs in the background a BBS and mailer that acts as a major Host and Hub for mail and files to over 40+ other systems around the world, with Apache as a web server, FTP via proftp (did try and use
pure-ftp but with very limited success), Mysql (OK mariadb - which is NOT
the same in some aspects and here you cannot remove mariadb and swap it out with mysql as there are too many packages that require it and would have to
be removed - more later). Various programming tools including compilers
such as gcc, clang (when gcc produces excess error when compiling a
program), GnuCobol for development and testing of my Accounting s/w - ACAS available via sourceforge), Mainframe s/w directly and indirectly available mostly for my own use but was so I can work from home as a Freelance programmer, and senior tester etc although that mostly has ended due to my
age.
For the web server (Apache) it uses a lot of Perl modules that have been installed in order to run correctly and securely and here was the major rub that the upgrade to v9 did not process them NOR provide warning that it
could not for what ever the reason was and this would have helped possibly
spot the issues before getting failure during various elements of the
software failing without direct warnings (like only in the log files and
not on the screen).
It does not help that many of such warnings goes to local mail (which can
be picked up by using the mail program but as I use Thunderbird, I had it
grab those every morning along with all my emails every 30 minutes.
Now since the upgrade along with a later version of Thunderbird this
function no longer works and I cannot find what is wrong and therefore how
to fix it. IT is these sort of funnies that are a right pain and even more
so as this is my production system.
These are the issues as of now that I have found and does not mean that
there are not others that I have not so far seen but no doubt will rear
their ugly head over time while still doing development, testing and
document writing of my accounting system which does date back to the 70 -
80's. This was a commercial product that was sold as a one off price or a subscription model up to the late 90's / early 2000's but when I
technically retired decided to make it available to every one as a FOC so
that the work over many years was not wasted - OK, a lot of my effort :).
I should point out that having a very extensive background to working on a large range of mainframes since the 60's I have come to be very slow in
doing any upgrades from one version to the next as I prefer to wait while
the bugs are found and fixed. Mainframe updates such as the O/S (Operating System) which also includes all of the products also installed such as compilers and in this case will involve testing all suites (applications) currently in use or about the be so) to ensure nothing is now broken. This takes up a lot of time by a team of anything from 5 to 20+ people over some months and as I have only me that can not really happen so I let all the
other users of Mageia run and hopefully test and report bugs it it that are show stoppers in a real world environment that basic testing would not show
up.
I like at least 6 months or better and even up to 12, subject to pucker
factor.
I do use LTS O/S distro's for my media recorder / player computer and
another that runs on a not now so often Raspberry Pi for off loading some
work from my main system as a JIC (Just In Case) basis.
Also in the mix is a Apple MAC Pro 2008 running twin 4 core Xeon CPU's that
is rarely used almost from day one and I must get around to selling it on
eBay as it was a major expenditure that is just not used. Hopefully this or next month !
There is other kit such as a laptop (Win 11), notebook (baby laptop for
when I used to travel around running Win 10) and my wife's desktop, an 20
year old system running Win 10 (can't run 11 ditto with the notebook) and
my own system can also only Win 10 on the very odd event that I load it.
Vincent
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