On 2017-11-28 at 10:34, Michael Stone wrote: > On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 10:28:57AM -0500, The Wanderer wrote: > >> I've run across someone who says her machine is running Debian >> oldoldoldstable or maybe even oldoldoldoldstable, and who >> consequently can't upgrade to newer Debian. > > It's easier to say the code name than oldoldoldoldodlodlsdosdld.
Yeah, but I don't remember offhand which release had which codename, and I couldn't be arsed to look it up when I had a name that would work just as well. (Which happened to be the one she told it to me as.) >> I seem to recall that there *is* a way to do step-wise upgrades of >> such old systems, i.e. upgrading from oldoldoldoldstable to >> oldoldoldstable, then to oldoldstable, then to oldstable, then to >> stable. However, I'm stumped as to how to actually get started on >> doing that. > > The order of the releases is documented at > https://www.debian.org/releases/ > > Basically, adjust the sources.list to point to each one in oder, and > do the upgrades. Check the release notes for each upgrade to see if > special steps are necessary. That's the basic procedure for stepwise upgrades in general. It only works when there's an available repository to point to, however, which I thought was not the case for anything prior to oldoldstable. >> The last few steps of this are straightforward; oldoldstable is >> still available in the repos, as far as I'm aware. The first ones >> are more of a problem; if I understand matters correctly, anything >> prior to oldoldstable is removed from the live repos, although its >> .deb files are still maintained on e.g. snapshot.debian.org. (Which >> doesn't really suffice for the equivalent of a dist-upgrade, >> because you'd have to manually download all the correct .debs by >> hand and then install them with dpkg.) > > Use archive.debian.org instead of ftp.debian.org or whatever for very > old releases. Hm. I'd forgotten about that being available, if I'd ever known about it. I'll pass that information on; thank you! -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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