Migrating to Fedora 13

I had updated to fedora 13 soon after it was released - following the update approach as I have been doing for several years now.

I downloaded and updated fedora-release-13-1.noarch.rpm

Next step -

yum -update

Well, it failed. It complained about a number of packages and suggested I try

yum -update --skip-broken

Failed again. One of the problem packages was rb_libtorrent-python.

It could not be removed as Miro depended on it. It seemed strange.

'yum update Miro' worked and installed a few more dependencies. However, Miro stopped working and the update broke a few other packages - e.g. Firefox.

I reverted back to the original state. Erased Miro and rb_libtorrent-python.

Now, I could update the system using

yum -update --skip-broken

But it cautioned me that

Skipped (dependency problems):
mutter-mbl x86_64 2.28.1_0.12-1.fc13 fedora 1.2 M
mutter-moblin x86_64 0.43.8-4.fc13 fedora 2.4 M

I decided to clean the two packages before updating. I was not using moblin now, so I erased the group 'Moblin Desktop Environment'

The above two packages did not get erased and had to be removed manually.

After that the upgrade was fairly smooth other than the unstable network I was experiencing. I had to restart update about a couple of dozen times before the downloads were completed! Over 2 GB of packages were downloaded. Sadly, delta-rpm's still play no role across fedora versions.

After moving to Fedora 13, installing Miro was a breeze. There were no issues at all. So, what was the problem with rb_libtorrent-python?

The version on f12 was 0.14.10-1 while on f13 it was lower 0.14.8-2!

Subsequently, I noticed that java-1.6.0-openjdk was higher in f12 than in f13. However, it did not cause any issue in upgrading the system. Java openjdk package for f12 was retained. Packages updated from f13 repository did not complain about the mis-match of repositories.

By contrast, one of my systems with Arch Linux is using the same or higher versions of packages as Fedora 13. The packages have been steadily updated over a period of time with minimal friction.