Re: Is apt-get dist-upgrade worth the hassle?
On Mon, 2 Jul 2018 09:55:48 +0000 (UTC)
Curt <curty@free.fr> wrote:
> On 2018-07-02, Joe <joe@jretrading.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, 1 Jul 2018 17:43:02 -0500
> > David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>
> >> Why? If you find the cause, you can fix it. Upgrades are careful
> >> about preserving the system's integrity to run.
> >>
> >
> > Less and less with each version.
> >
> > I have a wheezy: I cloned it to a spare desktop machine, upgraded
> > with some significant difficulty to jessie, tried the next step to
> > stretch and abandoned it. I believe there will be less work in a
> > new install, which I'm now probably about a week into, with another
> > week to go.
> >
> > Back in the days of etch, it was an hour or two. Not any more.
> >
>
> I upgraded from Wheezy to Jessie to Stretch without a problem (except
> I ran out of space, which conveniently circles back on a certain
> raison d'être of this thread, and apt-get cleaned right in the middle
> of it all to free up room, which got me through while at the same
> time nearly condemning me to a special circle of dependency hell).
>
> Of course I'm talking here about upgrading *in situ*, a proven path,
> not cloning to another machine, whose specificities are unknown to us
> in relation to the cloned machine, and then upgrading from there, for
> reasons only known to yourself. In fact, Joe, I'm declaring an illegal
> goalpost move on you and fining you a blame (remember: three blames
> and you're out--or is that strikes?).
No, I'm not talking about hardware incompatibilities, I mean software
rot. For the most part, a drive moved to another machine will either run
normally or not at all. The copy ran fine on the other machine. It's a
server, so I'm not bothered about super-whizzy peripherals, wifi etc.
As long as there's enough RAM, and enough bits in the processor,
there's not usually much trouble.
But it's loaded (encrusted?) with a lot of server software, some of it
dating from sarge. Sometimes a version upgrade involves a significant
software upgrade, sometimes it doesn't. FreeRADIUS has hardly changed
at all for many years (though it's one that won't even start in
stretch). But as I mentioned to Michelle, PHP5 is no more, so there was
a fair bit of tweaking to old php stuff. Samba has dropped deprecated
configurations, and I have two versions of windows clients, so that was
another afternoon of messing about.
Systemd. Need I say more? It hasn't been all that difficult, but as I
said, old software, so a certain amount of mucking about with service
files. My iptables scripts were written on Linux From Scratch, then
installed on sarge. No go.
When there's that much work to do, upgrading seems pointless, one might
as well do a clean installation and leave at least some of the cruft
behind. That was my point: even with a lot of server software,
upgrading used to be a matter of half an hour for checking and cleanup,
half an hour of downloading, than maybe an hour of installation. Use
the new config files where needed, then another half-hour for tweaking
them to work like the old ones. Half a day at the most, with the
machine pretty well running normally during most of that time. It's not
like that now.
--
Joe
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