Re: Question: Why do you dist-upgrade?

Tim Kelley

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 12:13 PM, Reco <recoverym4n@gmail.com> wrote:

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.

Hm. Not for me, anyway. None of those reboots matter to me much.

> 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.

Oh absolutely. But it can make /etc cruftier over time. Being able to upgrade a distribution remotely is a very nice feature of Debian indeed.

/var contents will do you little good without /etc in most server
environments

/var's only separate because of the SSD (trying to activity on it, but I'm not sure that's really even an issue any more)

In my case, I use the same SCMS at home as I do at work (salt) and that's where I configure most everything, and that is backed by remote git, and backed up remotely in addition to that, so, I think I'm covered there. You're right though, the new install would be very painful without that, since you'd have to change a hundred little things, from /etc/papersize to all the shell settings (which I have a lot of). And I admit it's very uncommon for a home user to back their configuration up with an SCMS.

> The cons are that firstly, it's very time consuming and much more
> complicated.

See above.

You have to admit, there is much more to go wrong on an upgrade than a reinstall. Unless you were super-careful with your backports and software from outside the release in general that will cause problems, and while you might say "you should always be careful about that" it's also true that most people just aren't. But yes if you do it right, use /usr/local or /opt and /etc/local and /etc/opt, /var/opt and /var/local you should be fine, but I've never personally met anyone who does that. Or if you kept your stable plain vanilla - never met anyone who does that either.

And that's a perfect example of good software as all those years your

system booted successfully.

Well, yes, it is. I'm not dissing upgrading. I'd just rather re-install.