Escaping "upgrade hell"

[Alexander Dalloz]

Am Di, den 04.05.2004 schrieb John Aldrich um 19:59:

> I think he's probably talking about Debian and related distros where you just 
> do an "apt get" every night and it "automatically" updates everything to the 
> latest version and there's no need to wipe and reinstall the way that it's 
> often easier to do with RedHat / Mandrake / etc style distros.

I fear he could mean that. But that is a wrong impression, by two
meanings:

1) Running Debian you have not "most current versions" like Bob claimed
in his original posting. I am speaking here about the stable release.
Running "Debian unstable" you are certainly some kind of most current
but at the price of a bleeding distribution with very often fights
against the system and to get it proper working. "Debian testing" might
be taken a good choice by many Debian users, but it is neither stable
nor does is have security updates.

2) You could upgrade Redhat releases the same way like Debian too. There
are a lot of people who upgraded from former releases step by step. Of
course, Debian is an exception because it ships a new stable release
only once per decade, so upgrading is more rare. But upgrading means for
all distribution: changes on the base system. Debian is no exception in
that way. And if you did customize your system in a huge way you will
face upgrading difficulties with each distribution.

I do not want to bash Debian. But Fedora meanwhile has with up2date and
yum apt like tools on board too. And apt lovers can get it for the RPM
system too from external.

Alexander


-- 
Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG key 1024D/ED695653 1999-07-13
Fedora GNU/Linux Core 1 (Yarrow) on Athlon CPU kernel 2.4.22-1.2188.nptl
Sirendipity 20:16:55 up 7 days, 19:05, load average: 0.70, 0.26, 0.15 
                   [ Γνωθι σ'αυτον - gnothi seauton ]
             my life is a planetarium - and you are the stars
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