Walter Dnes wrote:
On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 02:17:08AM -0800, Karsten M. Self wroteYou clearly haven't grasped the philosophy of Debian. The above paragraph betrays a gross misunderstanding on your part. You *don't* "wipe and reinstall" to do a Debian upgrade. You run: # apt-get update; apt-get -u dist-upgrade ...and your packages are updated in place. No reboot necessary, with the exception of kernel updates, and IIRC a recommended restart (single-user was sufficient) for a really hairy libc update.It looks like I'm going to have to do a lot of un-learning of Redhatin addition to learning Debian<g>.
Thanks Walter. You reminded me of one of the great benefits I got from switching to Debian. It was the right choice. Broken kmultimedia dependencies in unstable/testinng are hereby forgiven. *smugly pats self on back*
I hear that the other distros are trying to get their systems working like this. But I have a stack of Mandrake CDRs going back several years that offends me everytime I look at it. What a waste of time, bandwidth and blank media. When I switched to Debian a couple of years back I burnt out all of the CDs and the 2.2 vanilla boot disks. I think it must have been a comfort thing based on my experiences with other distros. I found them this week all dusty and unused. I used the netinst of testing recently from a CDRW that I've already blown away. I have enough faith in Debian that I don't feel the need to have original media wasting my time and space - I just apt-get what I need, even if it's a major version upgrade (it helps that I have a good 'net connection too). Many thanks to the Debian package maintainers for doing such a good job!
Malc