Re: Skipping releases on dist-upgrades [was: Re: Is this safe?? Chrome in Debian 6]
On Mon, 21 Jul 2014 04:37:40 -0400
Tom H <tomh0665@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 4:16 AM, Joe <joe@jretrading.com> wrote:
> >
> > There will only be a few who claim that jumping a release is a great
> > thing to do.
>
> There's already been one thread about this on debian-devel@ and it was
> a typical thread where the pro and con make their points but no
> decision's reached. That discussion'll be back because there are
> people who think that they ought to be able to go from squeeze-lts to
> jessie in one step - and they'll tell you that one upgrade is safer
> than two.
>
>
Two upgrades that are almost certain to work are safer than one which
hasn't been tested...
Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Debian (including
developers?) will know that the order in which things are done can be
extremely important.
A system which has been upgraded from a previous release will not be
identical to a clean install. Functionally it should be the same,
but not in detail. And I've more than once been faced with a massive
logjam in a sid upgrade, where aptitude wanted to remove half the
system, and managed to manually complete the upgrade with no removals
with a bit of trial and error, selecting things to upgrade piecemeal.
These things suggest that skipping a release is a bad idea, and may
well leave you painted into an inaccessible corner.
Something a bit related that I do usually do is to install unstable with
a single dist-upgrade from stable to unstable. But unstable is usually
very similar to testing, and I only do this with a bare console-based
minimal installation, before building the system up in unstable. But
even then, I'm prepared to find a case one day when that won't work, and
I have to do it again in two steps. No problem, there's no real
investment there. There most certainly is a great deal of investment in
a production system, too much to risk to save an hour or two.
--
Joe
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