Nate Bargmann wrote:
I normally don't, either. The upgrade from Sarge to Etch was my first re-install ever. I have been running Debian since Bo, which was about eight, or nine years ago IIRC. I have been through several system upgrades and hard disc changes, but I just move the HD to the new system, or copy it to a new HD and install that. The only reason that I did a re-install this time was the large amount of cruft that had accumulated. In retrospewct, it may have made the change to udev and XOrg easire, but people doing recent upgrades seem not to be having trouble with that either. Now that I am using aptitude, instead of apt-get, I am hoping that this will not be necessary in another eight, or nine years.* Curt Howland <Howland@priss.com> [2007 Mar 13 17:08 -0500]:With a desktop system, every few years there seems to be a reason to reinstall, so far mostly due to buying new laptops, disks, and/or the incompetence of hardware service people who "help" me by putting Windows XP back on the system while they have it helpless in their clutches.Even then, I don't bother, prefering to use rsync to copy everything over to the "new" hardware, making the configurations I need to and continuing on. By default packages are just removed and not purged which leaves a lot of extra config files around. On occasion I purge the packages with a 'c' status.
Debian rocks! -- Marc Shapiro mshapiro_42@yahoo.com