Re: Upgrading from one Debian (like Potato) to another (like Woody)
On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 06:34:17AM -0700, Larry wrote:
> I ran into considerable difficulty in trying to move
> from Potato to Woody.
>
> Starting with -- no instructions in the Woody dist to
> do that, only a note to use the Potato update
> instructions.
There are upgrade instructions in the woody release notes, which you
should have read. They may refer to potato for one or two details but
definitely not for the whole process.
> Eventually, I simply "installed" the Woody version,
> which only affected my root partition anyway, with
> /home and all user accounts being on another partition
> and unaffected.
>
> Is the re-install generally the best way to move to a
> new Debian?
Absolutely not. We work very hard on upgradability.
> I did all the apt-cdrom add, apt-get update, apt-get
> upgrade, apt-get upgrade-dist, and all I got for that
> effort was error messages, halted processes, and
> eventually a system that wouldn't allow any user to
> run X windows. I realize one can probably fix these
> things, the question is -- is it less time spent to
> simply install the new system?
Usually, no. However, we'd need to see details of what actually went
wrong.
I much prefer upgrading with dselect. I've spent too much time fixing
very subtle problems with 'apt-get dist-upgrade' that really shouldn't
have gone wrong (debconf and xbase-clients upgrade problems come to
mind) that I don't trust it.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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