On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 08:57:45AM +0100, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 20:02:54 -0700, Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org>
> wrote:
> >Oddly enough, most FreeBSD sysadmins don't appear to mind doing things much
> >more invasive than a dist-upgrade, every six months. This has largely to do
> >with the fact that most upgrades are very smooth, and don't require, say, a
> >complete reinstall.
>
> Oddly enough, nobody at me ex-orkplace (having about 20 FreeBSD boxes
> in productive use) dared to touch any of the BSD boxes. We had
> productive Servers running FreeBSD 2.x, and I believe that this hasn't
> changed.
This isn't my experience, or that of any of the other FreeBSD admins I (yes,
know I do admin some FreeBSD boxes, for various reasons, even though n't my
it ispreferred platform in any sense).
> >In this regard, Debian actually resembles the *BSDs much more closely than
> >most other Linux distributions (and that isn't a bad thing).
>
> NACK. Debian is much easier to upgrade since we keep older versions
> around. Updating older FreeBSD base systems should work fine, but
> compiling new ports is a nightmare if you can't step up one release at
> a time. The only thing you can safely do is to build new systems and
> slowly migrate. Debian is much better in that regard.
Mmmm. I rarely have problems with such, but I suppose I also don't, as a
rule, allow my systems to get terribly out of date. Though I have my doubts
as to how 'safe' trying to upgrade from Debian 1.0 (which I don't recall
the codename for, and I'm too lazy to go look it up) to Sarge would work
well, even with release-by-release upgrades.
Stipulated, it would be far more likely to work, because one can (at least,
in theory) find the entirety of the old releases, rather than just the
core. However, my point stands: most Linux releases - at least, those not
based on Debian's core - *don't support upgrading over a major version
change*. The BSDs do, and Debian does; thus, saying that Debian does so
better puts it on the far side of the BSDs from, say, RedHat.
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU/KLNetBSD(i386) porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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