<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 8:57 PM, Dave Platt <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dplatt@radagast.org">dplatt@radagast.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<div class="im"><br>> I know this is an {*} list but does anyone know if simply adding the Squeeze<br>> repository to my sources.lst and running an 'aptitude<br>> upgrade/safe-upgrade/full-upgrade" will just upgrade Lenny -> Squeeze<br>
> without me having to rebuild the system from scratch?<br><br></div>In my experience: you're likely to run into a few things which<br>need some amount of manual fiddling, after an upgrade of this sort,<br>but it's usually quite manageable.<br>
<br>The Debian people seem to be very good about making sure that<br>stable-version-to-stable-version upgrades go smoothly... the<br>process isn't perfect (from what I've seen) but it's usually<br>quite close. The upgrade path is usually tested out quite well<br>
before the release team throws The Big Switch, and there normally<br>are good release notes which describe the corner cases which may<br>need manual intervention.<br><br>I have several systems which have been through multiple major<br>
Debian upgrades, without having to be slagged down and rebuilt<br>from the ground up. That's better than I ever achieved with (e.g.)<br>Red Hat, which (in my experience) really didn't take at all well to<br>in-place upgrades... I usually had to do a fresh install and then<br>
port my personal files over.<br><br>Things may not be as smooth when jumping from Stable to Testing,<br>precisely because this isn't an official-release pathway, and<br>the packages in Testing are usually in somewhat of a state of<br>
flux. Even upgrades *within* the Testing distribution can leave<br>you with a system which doesn't fly right... this isn't common but<br>it does happen. For example, a recent upgrade within Stable pulled<br>a bunch of the firmware files out of the kernel package and moved<br>
them to a separate "non-free" package - if I hadn't noticed an error<br>message during RAMdisk rebuilt, my next boot would have left me<br>with a non-functioning wired Ethernet adapter.<br><br>If you decide to follow this route, follow the Debian instructions<br>
for upgrading... back up your package configurations, and (I suggest)<br>everything in the /etc/ directory hierarchy, as well as all of your<br>personal files. This will give you a much better chance to invoke<br>the spirit of the ancient pagan god DoOver, if something goes wrong<br>
during the upgrade.<br>
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<div class="gmail_quote"><font color="#000099" face="trebuchet ms,sans-serif">Thanks Dave. Sounds like a man who's not had his hand soaking in ivory liquid and been through the toils and tortures of various upgrades over the years. Very insightful though. Goof thing this discussion ensued as I am learning a lot about what to be wary of not least of all, the truth about "testing", RC and stable distribution. Which is why, despite eating humble pie re: the RC vs Stable discussion, I was going to wait till the status on RC changes to "stable" and maybe even help out a bit in the upgrade path testing. Good thing is that I don't necessarily need to muck around with the Production machines at the moment as all development is being done in the Lab, and some of that is in VMs, so I have the power of snapshots with me along with physical access to machines should anything break badly. The production machines are sitting 10,000 miles away so the best I have is console access to them. </font></div>
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<div class="gmail_quote"><font color="#000099" face="trebuchet ms,sans-serif">Speaking of in-place upgrades, does adding the Squeeze repo. in the sources.lst conf and running 'aptitude safe-upgrade/full-upgrade' automaticaly begins the upgrade or is there more to it? You mentioned about backing up configs and data etc so it doesn't sound like it's that simple eh?</font></div>
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