On 13 Jun, Matthew Palmer wrote: > I wouldn't say that it can't fail, but I can't think of too many upgrades of > Debian or Ubuntu boxes where it's completely done itself in, and I've done > some pretty crazy stuff over the years -- custom packages, mixing releases, > that sort of thing. On the other hand, I have seen some people who've > managed to make a complete dog's breakfast of their systems such that the > system won't upgrade, but I think that's more PEBKAC than PEID.
That seems to be the consensus. (No one has volunteered any serious problems in upgrading a Debian system.) Though Billy Kwong noted that it depended a bit on how many packages you have installed: > With Debian, it depends on the packages you have installed. Often times > there will be old packages that would prevent a smmooth dist-upgrade, but > they can be resolved quite easily (remove the old offending package first). > Normally apt or dpkg would tell you how to resolve such problem if it > exists. That's a worry, actually. I seem to have a knack for finding good, usable software that then gets abandoned. Because I like the usability of the older package I don't want to remove it; but it stands in the way of newer versions needed by other software. I suspect this problem will continue to exist as long as we continue to use shared objects instead of static linking. On the subject of Gentoo, I confess I had a bad experience with it two years ago because it would happily try to install packages with conflicting dependencies - e.g. I requested Jack in the USE options and the system couldn't install due to conflicts between OSS and Alsa or something. This seemed a bit of a design flaw. (For those interested, Menno Schaaf pointed me at how gentoo upgrading works: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-upgrading.xml) Consensus on RH seems to be that the upgrade problem strongly exists for that. So I think I'll try Ubuntu - last time I tried to install a plain Debian (nine months ago), I gave up after I realised I still had another 200 hundred questions to answer about configuring the kernel, and if I changed my mind about an earlier question I'd suffer. BTW, what approach do these upgradable distros take to installing new kernels? I.e. keeping the right modules available and matched to the kernel that's booting, and allowing older kernels to stay in the boot config? Does Ubuntu allow the use of Lilo instead of Grub? Thanks for all the replies, on and off the list, BTW. luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
