[NCLUG] Debian Question

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 12:07:11AM -0700, David Braley wrote:
> I typically do an "apt-get update," "apt-get upgrade," "apt-get 
> dist-upgrade," and an "apt-get clean" at least once a week to keep it up to 

Contrary to what Paul does, I *ONLY* do "dist-upgrade" on my Debian
systems.  "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade".  I once asked taggart
what the difference was between upgrade and dist-upgrade and he said
something to the effect of "<shrug> I just always do dist-upgrade."

Now, back to the topic at hand...  Realize that if you're tracking testing
you're talking about doing fractions of a full upgrade whenever someone
pushes new stuff into Debian and they pass a small amount of testing.  So,
you're going from the pain of doing a major update every like 18 to 36
months, to doing hundreds of smaller, but much more likely to break things,
updates over that same 36 months.

I don't mean that to sounds as FUDy as it may, you should just be aware of
the trade-off.  One of the reasons I'm not really interested in running
Debian testing is that there are all these micro updates, on whatever
schedule the maintainers set.  "Death by a thousand cuts" is kind of
overdramatic, but does come to mind when I think about it.

But, knowing David, I'd probably say this is a good match for him.  He
likes to fiddle with things.  I like to fiddle with things once every year
or two and then basically stay the same.  This is why I tend to do full
re-installs instead of just doing the installer update.  However, if you
install a lot of third-party packages, which I do, the installer updates
tend to work less well than if you stick with stock packages on Fedora and
similar.

> So my first question is how long will I get away with this? Is it possible 

What I've heard from people who have done this is, given a little bit of
pain all the way along, you can pretty much do this indefinitely.  "Never
having to do a re-install" is something you hear Debian people talk about,
and in general they're correct.

Though when you're comparing doing a "dist-upgrade" when the upstream
rolls or within a few months of then, it's not a clear win over doing an
Anaconda update in Fedora/CentOS/RHEL...

As Stephen says, if you really want to just install and configure and then
not fiddle with it, Ubuntu LTS or RHEL/CentOS are the best options.  As
long as you're willing to live with the level of software they have put on
them, which is probably at least 6 months from the leading edge, best case.

Sean
-- 
 Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
 character, give him power.  -- Abraham Lincoln
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability