On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 10:12 AM Ben Koenig <[email protected]> wrote:
> -------- Original Message -------- > On Apr 14, 2022, 7:34 AM, Robert Citek < [email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 12:52 AM TomasK <[email protected]> > wrote: > > On Wed, 2022-04-13 at 20:22 -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > > Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: > > > > > > 1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? > > > > > It is easy to go from one LTS to the next: 16.04 --> 18.04 --> 20.04 > I used to do that and never had an issue. But I do not have an extremely > customized set up. > I first install in a VM to update and verify my install flow, then on a > > test machine - then I deploy it everywhere. There is plenty of support > > overlap to do that at my own pace. > A variation on that theme is to have a thin OS running a hypervisor on the > bare hardware and run everything else in a VM. VMs make upgrades really > painless, especially if using tools like Vagrant and a configuration > manager like Ansible. But even if you’re not using those tools, VMs are > nice for snapshotting, upgrading, testing, cloning, migrating, and > reverting, if necessary. Of course, you could always use your favorite > backup/restore utility, if not using a VM. > Regards, > - Robert > > https://xkcd.com/1827/ > > Be careful about survivorship bias. You have to look at dist-upgrade > failures as a percent of total attempts. > > During my internships at Free Geek, I helped implement custom packages > that disabled all dist-upgrade prompts. For a user base exceeding 10,000 > end-users, fixing failed dist upgrades was a problem we dealt with > frequently. A lot can go wrong with that process. > > I bet they still have the old ticket data if someone wanted to calculate > their failure rate. Totally agree. And that's why I recommend using VMs and/or making backups. For the 100's (1,000's?) of times that it works, there's the one that doesn't. And that one is gonna hurt. - Robert
