Re: Re: Trouble with upgrading debian 7 (wheezy) (solved)
Hello,
On Tue, Sep 01, 2020 at 08:23:33PM -0500, R. Ramesh wrote:
> I did think about fresh install, but every method has its drawback. There
> are subtle changes that I could not get right in the past, so I chose
> upgrade path.
Last year I did do a squeeze to stretch upgrade by upgrading to each
release in turn (not directly from squeeze to stretch). It did work.
I did have to use archive.debian.org and I vaguely recall I had to
tell it to ignore expired keys and essentially trust
archive.debian.org to give me untampered-with files, but I don't
recall the exact details and was travelling at the time I read your
email so I decided not to reply with vagueness.
So, just wanted to say that this *is* possible even from very old
releases, if one is willing to put the effort in.
Of course, you are much better off keeping up with the Debian
release cycle at least to the point where the first release you're
upgrading to hasn't been archived yet!
The base Debian install is very easy to upgrade; it's always the
applications that cause the grief. A multi-release upgrade like that
can move through several different completely different
configuration layouts for big packages like web servers and database
servers, leaving you to pick up the pieces at the end.
The downtime from that can be significant and it must be weighed
against the approach of doing a new install (possibly on different,
concurrently running hardware) and just moving the data over.
> The keys expire on an archive that is supposed to be accessible.
The expired keys do complicate life but my understanding of the
rationale is that the limited key lifetime serves as a sort of
contract regarding the integrity of the files. Once a release has
been archived it does not fall under that promise from the project
any more and so the expired keys serve as a way to underscore that.
Without the key expiry, users may think that Debian has promised
to take care of the integrity of those files forever, but it hasn't.
I'm trying to remember what I had to do. It may have been:
# apt-get -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update
but I admit it could also have been me manually downloading the .deb
files from archive,debian.org and installing them with dpkg.
Cheers,
Andy
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