Re: UNS: Debian 4.0 Upgrade Path
On Friday 22 January 2010 20:27:55 Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> Dear Thiemo,
>
> Thiemo Nagel wrote:
> > However if that is the case, I wonder if oldstable support could be
> > extended for some more time.
> >
> > I know that all the work is done by volunteers and I'm very grateful for
> > what they do. Still I think that especially in the sector of
> > institutional use, the popularity of Debian could be improved by
> > offering longer support cycles. I don't think Debian should go as far
> > as Microsoft does (10 years of support for Windows 2000), but 5 years of
> > support in my opinion would be more suited to the typical upgrade [*]
> > cycles in large organisations. [**]
>
> IMHO, the companies, organisations and scenarios you mention can not be
> compared to what Debian does. IMHO Debian's support cycle is rather
> long, but what is the *real* difference is that Debian supports 'on the
> fly' upgrades without reinstalling and typically with a single reboot
> (to boot the new kernel version). A typical Debian upgrade will lead to
> a downtime on the order of a few minutes once every 2 years, compared to
> tedious manual reinstallation required on other systems. It is
> straightforward to semi-automatically upgrade some 100 machines via ssh
> without ever touching the machines and it will only take a rather short
> time of actual work.
>
> I don't really understand, why you want to reinstall instead of
> upgrading your machines, if you think that this is too much effort.
>
> Personally, I very much prefer the debian way to any of the alternatives
> you mention. Thanks and cudos to the developers for their great work!!!
>
> Cheers,
> Johannes
>
> [NB: I won't mention here that the support cycles of some versions of M$
> have been extended for the sole reason that the quality of later
> versions was so poor that many customers (especially corporate) refused
> to upgrade. ]
>
Hi!
Complementing Johannes answer, one of the things that i like on the debian
releases and upgrades, is that it is long enough to have a really stable
environment, but not soooo long that, when upgrade time comes, it is just
easier to reinstall the whole thing, as can be the case with the "enterprise"
distros, who have 5-7 years of support.
Bye!
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