[Tfug] Machine Rehabilitation

[Andrew Ayre]

Claude Rubinson wrote:
> Here's the thing.  Once you install, you simply stop worrying about it.
> Having pointed your sources.list to ../debian stable main, the next
> time that a stable version is released, your system will be seamlessly
> upgraded.  No muss, no fuss, and no worrying about your system no
> longer being supported.  Granted, it's a very different way of
> thinking about it but in the end it means that you stop worrying about
> your operating system and just focus on your work.
> 
> Rick Moen has a nice discussion of the concept of releases in Debian
> over at http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/releases-unimportant.html
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Claude

Hi Claude,

Please bear with me while I try to understand how this works. I think I
am misunderstanding something important.

We have a server in a farm that uses Sarge. We just upgraded it to Etch
and it was a significant ordeal. Here are all the upgrade steps involved:

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html

During the upgrade we were faced with a lot of decisions, mainly about
configuration files, but it seems some applications, like Courier for
example, changed the way they are structured.

The result was that our email system, subversion and apache all broke.
When we rebooted the server grub didn't point to the new kernel so we
had to use the emergency TTY interface to get it running again.

So far from stopping worrying about it my colleague has now set
sources.list to point to etch, not stable. This means that eventually we
will become out of date again. His argument is that if we let the repo
change "behind our back" then when we go to upgrade something someday we
will be suddenly faced with 100s of upgrades of dependencies, breaking
of configuration files, etc. He would prefer to install new software
only from backports because it is a less drastic change.

It's hard for me to argue against this because of the hassle we went
through upgrading from Sarge to Etch.

So from our point of view right now the Debian system doesn't seem to
remove upgrade hassles.

I would be interested to know your thoughts on this.

Andy


-- 
Andy
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