[NCLUG] Suggestions for a distro change

grant at amadensor.com grant at amadensor.com
Tue Apr 7 13:44:16 MDT 2009


> This is an interesting argument, and maybe I am miss-informed.  But it
> took two years for lenny to be stable.  That means that Etch had a product
> support time for 3 years (two years it was the current product + 1 year
> past it's replacement time).
>
> So even though it is only 1 year past product life time, the product
> versions do not change very fast.  At least that is my understanding,
> correct me if I am wrong.
>
> cheers,
> Mike Jensen
> jent at afkfoo.com

The other thing to consider is the pain of the upgrade.   Usually Debian
old-stable to Debian stable is not too bad.  The down side of going with
Debian is an upgrade every 3 years or so, but a reasonably easy upgrade
every three years may be better than a bad one every 7 years.

Personally, I pin to a release.  Usually testing while doing development
if it looks like it will be stable by deployment.  Then I get that time,
plus all of the time that release is stable, plus the year after the
update to do the upgrade.

Right now, I have machines still on Etch, and since Lenny looks good so
far, I have 10 months to plan and implement the upgrade.   I will probably
test the applications on Lenny first, but if they work, I have a pretty
clean in place upgrade, without the pain of the re-install.  Additionally,
Debian is usually pretty good about warning when things might break
because of an upgrade.

I have a machine that was originally "Woody" when installed, and has gone
through Sarge, Etch, and Lenny without a re-install.  The only painful bit
was going to Etch (new X) really worked best when I un-installed X, and
then re-installed it.  The pain was making the list of everything else I
wanted to keep that depended on X that also had to be re-installed.




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