Re: Question: Why do you dist-upgrade?
Hi.
On Wed, 29 Apr 2015 11:11:52 -0500
Tim K <kelletim@gmail.com> wrote:
> For me, and I think anyone with a sensibly laid out system, it's so much
> less trouble and time to reinstall.
While the amount of trouble is subjective, the install/upgrade time is
objective. And it's the last one that you estimated wrong.
An debian-installer, being a complex frontend to debootstrap, install
packages and configures them. It also does disks partitioning, and the
whole process requires two reboots (to installer and to a new system).
An upgrade process installs the packages, configures them, but does not
do partitioning. Also requires a single reboot that can be postponed
indefinitely.
An upgrade is simply faster.
> I can only really think of one reason
> to dist-upgrade, and that's if the system is remote (and a very good reason
> it is). I'm wondering why some of you dist-upgrade ... do you just like it
> that way? A habit?
Upgrade can be done via SSH. Upgrade retains all my packages installed.
The most important thing is - upgrade does its best in handling all
those customizations in /etc.
Re-install *can* be done via SSH (although not by default), but that's
it.
> I keep my /home and my data (/share) and /var on a separate disk and only
> the system goes on / (an ssd).
/var contents will do you little good without /etc in most server
environments.
> Still have to painfully deal with outdated
> configuration wrt the desktop environments, so I just make a new (fake)
> user to see what the new layout is.
I stopped using DEs back in 2007, so I can not comment on this.
> The cons are that firstly, it's very time consuming and much more
> complicated.
See above.
> Second, and perhaps most importantly, you're going to be left
> with older versions of things when a paradigm has changed.
If software works *and* is supported by Debian - it's good software,
and there's nothing to worry about.
If software works *but* is no longer supported by Debian - it's
obsolete software, and replacing it with something is a part of
post-upgrade process.
If software does not work after the upgrade - it's a bug.
So if upgrade leaves you with old familiar software - it's a good thing.
> I dist-upgraded
> for the longest time and was hence completely unaware of grub2 for several
> years, since the maintainers of it wisely did not upgrade me to it!
And that's a perfect example of good software as all those years your
system booted successfully.
I mean - grub was able to boot your system.
Grub2 is able to boot your system.
What's the key difference?
> I can
> see the same happening with init systems being switched about.
You'll get systemd as a result of 'apt-get dist-upgrade' so there's
nothing to worry about.
> I guess if
> you care and read the release notes carefully this won't happen though.
And reading release notes *before* the upgrade is considered essential
regardless of whenever you're re-installing or upgrading :)
Reco
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