Re: UNS: Debian 4.0 Upgrade Path

[Jens Schüßler <jgs@trash.net>]

* Thiemo Nagel <thiemo.nagel@ph.tum.de> wrote:
> 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..."

I see that, but the questions is if it'll be less effort for the users
and you to deal with all the changes in software that happened between 
etch and squeeze or more work than going to the next release.


Jens