[Yum] Upgrading between distros with YUM

[Val Schmidt]

I was looking through the archive and noticed this thread...
https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum/2005-January/005854.html

in which someone asks about whether yum will ever support upgrading 
between distro releases. The response was that there are a number of 
things you'd never want to do on a running system including messing 
with disks and partitions.

But then there was this thread...
https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum/2005-January/005842.html

in which someone (in the second message) describes installing the 
redhat-release and yum rpm's from FC3 with --nodeps and then executing 
a "yum upgrade" to upgrade to the new distro. Viola!

My questions are these:

1) For distro-upgrades in which you don't need to mucky with 
partitions/disks/lvm, etc., is there anything wrong with the method 
used in the second thread? In my experience it works fine, other than 
occasionally needing to uninstall a few packages to meet the required 
dependancies.
2) If the method will reliably produce an upgraded system, I'd like to 
suggest that yum be modified to do this automatically when "upgrade" is 
specified. (that is, install the redhat-release and yum rpm's from the 
new next distro, and then complete the rest of the yum upgrade routine)
3) Why is "upgrade" described as deprecated in the yum man page anyway?

-Val


------------------------------------------------------------------
Val Schmidt
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University
61 Route 9W
Palisades, NY 10964
m: 614 286 3726
vschmidt[at]ldeo.columbia.edu