On Thu 21 Apr 2022 at 07:03:01 (-0500), Richard Owlett wrote: > I am not upgrading in place. > > I currently have Debian 9.13 installed on one partition with /home on > a different partition. > > I will install Debian 11.3 on a fresh partition and have /home remain > on its current partition. > > I'm aware of cautions about upgrading in-place cf > [https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html] > > Are there things to be aware of when using the same /home partition on both?
Apart from the things that hit you anyway when you upgrade, like the disappearance of Python2, and incompatible dotfiles that might or might not be automatically adjusted for you, you may have to cope with retaining the older versions of configuration files so that you can boot back and forth. I use symlinks where necessary, so I have the Debian codename written at the end of the first line of my sources.list, and that sets $Mycodename accordingly. Some symlinks are also handling $HOSTNAME so that I can share configuration files between different machines. When I start using a new version, I move the dotfiles for some packages out of the way, and let a new set be written. Then I diff the new dotfiles against a set of virgin dotfiles from the previous version to see what's changed, and make appropriate changes to my own set of files. Firefox can be a pain, so I set up a global variable that contains $HOSTNAME-$Mycodename pairs which prevent me from accidentally upgrading FF before I'm ready, or accidentally running the previous version on any given machine. Again, if you run several machines, you might want to copy the /etc/ssh/ keys from the old version to the new installation for a peaceful life. If you have multiple users, then you want to make sure you use the same UIDs between versions and machines. Be careful if you copy system files between any of them, because certain packages use their own UID/GIDs, like exim (Debian-exim), apt-cacher-ng, which could translate into randomly different users elsewhere. (Most stuff is root/root.) Alsa: symlinked to the real files in /etc, that 1000 owns. Audacious: symlinks. Might be historical—I've been at it for years. Cups: verboten pre-bullseye. Lilypond: installed, but I only run downloaded tarballs from /home. Mc: symlinks were even required for libav/ffmpeg at one time. Mutt: needed the FF-style fix (above) when it had that write_bcc bug. X: as long as xtoolwait still runs, no version switches at present (only between hosts). Those are some that spring to mind. Disclaimer: I don't run any DE, let alone a variety of them, nor do I make serious use of *Office except as a viewer. I'm just running "standard" Debian, and taking my time over upgrading several, very different machines. Cheers, David.
