On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 11:26:18AM -0500, David Wright wrote: > On Wed 18 Aug 2021 at 07:39:26 (-0400), The Wanderer wrote: > > On 2021-08-17 at 13:36, Brian wrote: > > > On Tue 17 Aug 2021 at 16:00:57 +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: > > > > >> Do the update to Buster - take it as slow as you need to. Bring it > > >> bang up to date. > > >> > > >> For the Buster to Bullseye - > > >> > > >> READ RELEASE NOTES :) > > > > > > Of course! Do users not do this as a standard procedure? :) > > > > I don't - because I don't upgrade from one stable release to another; I > > track testing, continuously, throughout the development cycle. As such, > > there is no point in the release cycle at which it makes sense for me to > > read the release notes; at the start of the release cycle they don't > > exist yet, so there's nothing for me to read, and by the time they're > > finalized and the release is ready, I'm already fully upgraded. > > That seems perfectly reasonable: the issues that get included in the > Release Notes also get discussed here at the time they become issues. > And it also means that you never Upgrade from one release to the next. >
I've just spent the best part of my weekend hammering out installs as part of the media team. I'm one of these people that tends to run stable Debian - I don't bother reading release notes as a general rule if I think I know what I'm doing - meh, documentation, who needs it :) I've spent a chunk of time on the #debian IRC channels. Lots of people hitting a difference between apt-get and apt behaviour as the labels changed. It turns out that apt-get apparently requires you to take action and approve something, apt just does it. Query raised several times: it's in the release notes if anybody bothered to check - that's the reason why apt is recommended as far as I can see. This time round, the /etc/apt/sources.list files have changed for the security repo line. Again, lots of people asking the same sort of question. If you're doing two full upgrades - go back a couple of years and look to see what the first set of notes tell you because you will have forgotten - that was my rationale for saying to read the release notes in screaming capitals. It was a more visible reminder. If anyone chooses to run testing continuously - they know the security status, they know to expect huge churn just after a release / when a new version of GNOME / KDE is being assembled and there are library transitions and so on. Each to their own for something like this: there's no "royal road to Debian" that is the one true way to do things. > > It always bothers me to see "read the release notes!" hammered on as a > > reasonable thing to expect users to do, in terms which presents users > > who fail to do so as unreasonable. It probably does make sense in the > > relatively limited (if also probably relatively common) case of > > upgrading from (old)stable to stable, but it is certainly not so > > universal a matter as to make failing to do it so inappropriate that > > hammering on it in such absolute terms becomes appropriate. > > So exactly what's /bothering/ you? As a bystander. As a bystander, it bugged me far more today to see someone banging on a configuration file as root today without taking a copy beforehand. [Or in fact generally not taking a backup of a config file before you rewrite it: I'm a coward in the light of bad experiences and still screw things up after 20++ years of routine daily Debian use]. > Cheers, > David. > Thanks to all for sharing perspectives. All the very best, as ever, Andy Cater
