An Analysis of an Upgrade to Fedora 12

The upgrade to Fedora 12 required over 2gb of download. I wanted to measure some of the changes in the upgrade for my usage.

Number of packages installed increased by 131 packages. (F11:2232, F12:2363)

Some packages like the kernel and gpg-keys have multiple versions installed and some have both x64 and i386 architecture packages installed. Hence, let us consider the unique package names.

Unique package names increased by 121 packages (F11:2087, F12:2208)

26 packages present in F11 were removed, while 147 were added.

Among the common packages, 1289 had the same version in both F11 and F12. They differed in the release value.

Of these, 343 differed in the version after the 2nd decimal place and can be regarded as fairly minor version changes.

62 differed in the major version number and 380 in the first minor version, e.g. gnome desktop going for 2.26.x to 2.28.x. A number of packages, e.g. sugar packages, have a single digit version number.

How many of these 442 packages could not have been incorporated in Fedora 11?

Would delta rpm packages not be feasible across the upgrade?

Could there be better ways of managing packages which can handle additional usage patterns?

I plan to explore some simple usage patterns I have found hard to do with current schemes of distributions. (I am also planning to install Arch linux as an example of a rolling distribution to see if they meet such needs.)