Resistance is Futile - Using zypper to "upgrade" CentOS/RHEL to openSUSE/SLES
a project by RBrownSUSE
Updated over 4 years ago. 23 hacker ♥️.

zypper is magic

A number of experiments suggest that it may be feasible to run zypper from an openSUSE 'live' media against a 'foreign' RPM based OS installation (eg. CentOS) and then 'zypper dup' to openSUSE

Thanks to satsolver, openSUSE's heavy use of pkgconfig(), and our sometimes 'excessive' recommends, zypper always seems able to suggest a viable upgrade solution, replacing the foreign CentOS/RHEL packages with appropriate openSUSE ones

Rough edges

Of course, this wouldn't be a hackweek project if it 'just worked' - There are a number of rough edges that need serious effort before this idea is 'usable'

  • dracut - making sure mkinitd gets rebuilt to replace the 'foreign' dracut with our own
  • config files in different locations - a potential use case for Machinery?
  • different package names - is satsolver really smart enough to figure out how to upgrade packages with different names?
  • testing testing testing - this may work in the lab with very basic installations, does it really work in practice?
  • not just RPM's? - could we get zypper/libzypp/satsolver to understand .debs enough to know how to replace them?

Join this project

Looking for hackers with the skills:

packaging zypper dracut machinery

This project is part of:

Hack Week 11

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    Comments

    • bmwiedemann
      almost 10 years ago by bmwiedemann | Reply

      at some point we also had zypper binaries for Fedora in https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/zypp:Head/zypper but those seem to have bitrotten

      • RBrownSUSE
        almost 10 years ago by RBrownSUSE | Reply

        The way I was thinking of tackling this was by using an openSUSE liveCD. That way I have a known zypper/libzypp stack and point it to the 'foreign' OS using zypper -R (chroot). Also opens a few doors such as maybe converting to btrfs and snapshotting in a sane and safe way to rollback if the 'upgrade' goes horribly wrong.

    • ZeDestructor
      almost 10 years ago by ZeDestructor | Reply

      Why openSUSE instead of moving to a newer CentOS/RHEL? I'm genbuinely curious, and have been considering doing the opposite myself...

      • RBrownSUSE
        almost 10 years ago by RBrownSUSE | Reply

        Because openSUSE/SLE has a lot to offer which CentOS/RHEL do not. Quick examples - YaST, btrfs as a recommended filesystem for root, a huge library of packages in OBS and the platform to build your own, and a package manager that does RPM's 'right'. But right now, the only options for someone wanting to try jumping from one to the other is painful and probably involving reinstallation and lots of reconfiguration.. I want to see if we can make that easier - With zypper we can seamlessly jump not only from one version of our distribution to another (eg 12.3 to 13.1) but also from one 'type' of distribution to another (eg. regular openSUSE to rolling openSUSE Factory).. why shouldn't we also be able to jump from an entirely different distribution to openSUSE?

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