Hi. On Wed, 29 Apr 2015 11:11:52 -0500 Tim K <kelle...@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 Still have to painfully deal with outdated 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150429201310.1e1c982f125ac98cf1a9d...@gmail.com
