Re: Upgrade advantage in Debian vrs. RedHat
"David Z. Maze" <dmaze@debian.org> writes:
> And upgrading a Red Hat distribution, especially between major
> versions, is pretty much impossible; I've heard people have had very
> good results upgrading between versions of Debian.
I think that Debian people are just smarter at doing things the Debian
way than RH users are at doing things the RH way.
Upgrading a Redhat dist between major versions is quite doable. It's
trival between minor versions. But this depends on the admin having
done everything the RH way, so things can be upgraded easily.
It's depressingly common for RH admins to start replacing things with
tarballs here, rewrite init scripts to init your network instead of
using the provided hooks, etc. This stuff breaks on upgrades. If you
were to do the same stuff on Debian, it would probably break too.
Having done the RHL4->5->6->6.9beta->7.0 upgrades, I'm comfortable in
saying it can be done without much more pain than an rpm --rebuild on
your home-built RPMs and a bit of attention in /etc to check what
.rpm{save,new} popped up. (And a reboot, since you can't upgrade a
live system between versions.)
Again, it's probably the fact that Debian has everything packaged that
makes it easier to manage. A RH admin will have to install more
non-dist packages, and probably hasn't learned that rpmifying them
instead of just make install is a good idea.
--
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
The Macintosh is Xerox technology at its best.
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