[NCLUG] Debian Question

[Bob Proulx]

Matt Taggart wrote:
> David Braley wrote:
> > The reason I ask this is partly the reason I moved to Debian in the 
> > first place. I have used Linux for years now for all my computing needs. 
> > But what I hate about Linux is the typical one year or less release 
> > cycles that force you to upgrade your system.
> 
> Fortunately that mentality seems to remain only with the commercial 
> distros. I think Fedora is catching up with Debian with respect to 
> upgrading. What it takes is having a rock solid upgrade mechanism and the 
> developers getting used to depending on it for a long time.

By living on Testing or Unstable you are not avoiding the upgrade
hassle.  You are spreading it out over the days of the year.  Instead
of a large upgrade once every year or two (or whatever) you are doing
small localized upgrades every day or two (or week or whatever).  In
the end if you sum up all of the work done you will actually have
expended more effort tracking changes every week.  Some packages will
upgrade very often and you will have upgraded some of them twenty
times by tracking it whereas if doing a stable upgrade less often you
would have skipped many of the versions between.  But the changes at
any given week will be smaller and perhaps easier to manage.  The work
is amortized over time instead of lumped.

Additionally both Testing and Unstable are proving grounds.  Things do
break there in ways that need manual interaction to correct.  They are
not Stable, by definition, and as with any development environment
consisting of hundreds of developers and tens of thousands of
components all changing you should have no expectation that mistakes
won't be made and problems incurred.  Read the NEWS and README files
to keep up.

For corporate work a year goes by in the blink of the eye.  Updating
more often than once a year is simply too often.  About every two
years is a better fit.  In some cases longer or shorter depending on
the environment.  But alas much of the net is driven by hackers on the
daily bleeding edge and they expect everyone else to be there too.  I
am still resisting this trend myself and my critical production
machines all run Stable.

> > I would prefer to never do another major upgrade that involves a 
> > complete re-install, or at least only need to do it every 4 or 5 years 
> > if possible.
> 
> Should be no problem.

Agreed.  I ran my personal desktop through many years of stable
releases.  I upgraded through Potato, Woody, Sarge, and now Etch.

Bob