Re: Upgrade advantage in Debian vrs. RedHat
(Original reordered somewhat...)
Darryl RXthering <drothering@hotmail.com> writes:
DR> I have only installed so far using dpackage.
DR>
DR> If I do apt-gets for a whole set of packages, I will get my add-ons
DR> upgraded to the latest and greatest (if I understand this
DR> correctly). But I still will have to make a plan & upgrade the
DR> *system* software, right? I.e., *everything* isn't packaged.
Nope. Pretty much everything is packaged; using 'apt-get
dist-upgrade' should get you the most recent version of everything,
except the kernel. What you're thinking of as the "system software"
is probably the packages in the Debian "base" section; these get
upgraded along with everything else.
The one exception to this is the kernel; since it's reasonable to have
multiple kernel versions installed, each is in its own package. You
can manually install the most recent kernel package or not; things
should still work fine.
So:
DR> Can someone explain the advantage many see in Debian upgrades
DR> vrs. RedHat? To take a concrete example, lets say I planned to start
DR> upgrading my home throwaway box (where I put up slink a few years
DR> back).
In a sense, Red Hat *only* contains the "system software", so there's
no real way to upgrade everything (including "add-ons"). Just finding
the right RPM for a particular package is a pain; if you go to
e.g. rpmfind you get a big mass of packages, one of which might match
your distribution's libraries and use a compatible version of RPM.
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.
In short, to upgrade a Debian box between stable versions, you need to
check that your /etc/apt/sources.list file is correct (contains an
entry for "stable"), and run 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get
dist-upgrade', answer some questions, and you're done. (Appropriate
modifications of this using CDs are certainly possible.) With Red
Hat, you pretty much need to completely reinstall.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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