Sarge -> Etch: A Painful Upgrade

[Ralph Katz <ralph.katz@rcn.com>]

I've filed this as bug #418911 available here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=418911

Any discussion should probably be here.  Hopefully, my experience will
be useful to others.  I know I've benefitted greatly from reading and
participating here.

Regards,
Ralph

Excerpt from the bug report:
Background:

I'm a simple desktop user.  Installed debian in late 2003 from Woody CD
image, then upgraded immediately to sid.  (I had help with this
introduction to Linux.)

As sarge was being finalized, I downgraded from sid to testing
(painlessly!) and stayed with sarge all this time until April 9.  Along
the way, I've installed sarge on 4 other boxes without incident.  I've
contributed a few bug reports and posted many times to debian-user, so I
think I'm about as familiar with debian as a normal user (non-developer,
non-programmer, non-sys-admin) may be.

Sarge to Etch upgrade:
[...]
Bottom Line:
Having to load a knoppix live CD and  chroot to rescue this upgrade was
painful.
[...]