I have upgraded “manually” some binaries such as rclone and restic using self-update commands as I needed some of their newest features. In anticipation of future dist-upgrade, should I downgrade/restore them to the versions that’s provided in the fedora repos or will the system upgrade automatically upgrade/downgrade them to the version in the repos of the next release (now f37)?
If I need to restore them to the version that’s in the current fedora version ahead of a system upgrade, what’s the best way to do this? I can think of at least 3 commands, dnf reinstall (that should reinstall the latest version available in the repos), distro-sync with f36 that would deal with both restic & rclone at the same time (and possibly other), or the downgrade command. In theory all should work?
This all depends upon how you “manually” upgraded the packages. If it was from an official repo such as one of the testing repos then you probably will need to do nothing and it will work itself out with the system upgrade.
If you chose to get a version from a different source/repo then there may be a conflict caused with upgrades.
In general the advice has always been to do dnf upgrade --refresh before doing the system upgrade. It potentially could also be done as dnf distro-sync --refresh or similar so you have several options.
The reinstall or downgrade commands may or may not do what you want, but I would only worry about the situation if running the dnf upgrade --refresh command showed errors. If no errors are seen there then there should be no errors with the system upgrade.
I always use the dnf system-upgrade --releasever=XX download to start my system upgrades to the next version and if there are errors that show up there which were not already handled by the dnf upgrade --refresh command then that is the time to fix them (I have had none at that step so far for several releases).
Thanks a lot for the quick answer! I manually did it using the official command, for rclone, see rclone selfupdate This downloads & verifies the latest release of rclone. Same for restic which I use for backups.
I have tried the different commands in a virtual machine but the only one that seems to “work” is dnf reinstall rclone (for instance). It may be that self-update does not inform dnf about the version upgrade and so dnf still considers it to be at the version that’s on the repo.
I wonder if that can cause issues when doing a system upgrade as I would expect newer packages on the repo but perhaps not the latest. Probably best to reinstall to the default package before system upgrade and then see which version I end up with
Potentially the self-update would get things out of sync since it would not update the package manager (dnf or gnome-software) database. Also potentially when the repo receives an update it would overwrite what was put there by the self-update.
With that potential I almost always choose to use only the packaged versions unless there is a pressing need to use a self-update. (If it works don’t break it). Thus my system always is kept in sync with the distro repos.
How you handle the inconsistencies that may crop up is up to you.
Yep, makes sense. Indeed, I needed some of the newest features (bisync for rclone to set up sync between laptops) which has not yet made it to the version hosted on the Fedora repo. I’ll do a reinstall before a system upgrade or an upgrade of the package.
I suppose that if one compiles from source, issues would be similar?
I suggest you file a ticket on Bugzilla suggesting to update the rclone package. The version of rclone is the same for f34 through r37-beta. You will find the url for bugzilla by running the command rpm -qi rclone.