Dear Johannes, On 01/22/2010 11:27 PM, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
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.
when we upgraded from sarge to etch, it was at least a man month of work (not including the time spent by our users figuring out what has changed). We had to recompile kernels to support custom hardware, recompile custom software libraries with the new gcc version (requiring many changes to get it to compile), setup nfsroots for our netbooting hardware, migrate something like 20-30 services (many with changes to the configuration file syntax) and weeks later we still had users complaining that "xxx used to work before the transition..."
All of this is not Debian's fault. It's just the reality of maintaining a complex installation with a demanding user base. And it's tedious work with little productivity gain. I'd like to avoid it as much as possible.
Cheers! Thiemo