On Fri, Jun 07, 2013 at 06:37:21PM +1000, Erik Christiansen wrote:
Yes, having to reinstall all the extra bits and pieces is a major part of the pain every three years, so dist-upgrade sounds attractive, if it is reliable now. But ISTR that it probably won't jump me from e.g. Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS to the new LTS.
IMO using Ubuntu LTS is worse than using debian stable. by the time there's a new release they're not even recognisably the same OS - whatever was the great future direction in one LTS release will probably have been forgotten and replaced with something newer and shinier several times over by the next LTS. debian stable, for example, will offer upstart and systemd as options you can choose if you want, but it won't force them on you. default settings and default packages change only if there's an exceptionally good reason for it. chasing after current fads is generally not considered sufficient reason.
Things like having to blow away NetworkManager, to get networking to work, on each ubuntu installation, are also small irritations. If a dist-upgrade would respect its omission, then I could try an annual dist-upgrade.
dunno about ubuntu, but on debian i purged NetworkManager and similar dreck years ago (pretty much as soon as it appeared). it has never re-appeared on any subsequent upgrade - dozens of systems, hundreds of upgrades.
Switch back to debian, then try dist-upgrade every year or so, seems a good way forward, given your advice.
it wasn't so much advice as a question, i wanted to know if there was a good reason for your upgrade method. my method works for me and has done since i started using debian in 1994, and i've always seen in-place upgradability as one of debian's major advantages over (initially) SLS and Slackware and later Redhat and other upstart newcomers. it may work for you too, or it may not. my preference is to run debian sid aka 'unstable', even on most production servers (with very few exceptions - and even there i prefer 'testing' to 'stable'). but then, I think that the version of the distro is pretty much irrelevant, what matters is the versions of the packages installed. i.e. i don't really give a damn if i'm running debian 6.0 squeeze or 7.0 wheezy - but i do care what version of apache or postfix or mysql or postgres or whatever i have installed on any given machine. To me, installing the latest debian 'stable' release is just the first step in getting the REAL debian - sid, or testing - onto a machine. stable with some cherry-picking from testing or sid may work better for you. my suggestion would be that 'stable' is OK for 6 months or so after it is released but starting to get a bit stale. by twelve months, 'testing' is definitely better.
in my experience, you're much better off fixing the occasional minor problems or incompatibilities after an upgrade than you are trying to revert back to an earlier version.
When I buy a car, it should not require repairs in the first three years. There's so much else to spend time on, that unproductive distro futzing does not appeal any more.
software isn't a car, and neither is a computer. car-based analogies, popular as they are, don't really make sense. but if you insist on a car analogy....when you upgrade the radio in your car to the latest model, sometimes the controls are identical or very similar to the previous model, and sometimes they're completely different and require some practice before you get used to them. so it is with software upgrades and config files, usually they're the same but sometimes there are incompatible differences between the new version and the old. and the more that gets upgraded at once, the more problems there will be. i.e. a steady series of small incremental upgrades is far less troublesome than one huge upgrade every year or three.
plus, you get exciting new bugs to discover rather than boring old ones.
Hmmm, is it three decades spent fixing bugs in my own software which causes the entertainment value of bugs to be a much devalued currency
maybe i should have put a smiley on the end of that sentence. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #355: Boredom in the Kernel.