Re: Switching from Etch to Lenny - help me assess the risk.

On Sun, 9 Nov 2008 13:17:31 -0800
"David Fox" <dfox94085@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I was helping to update a friends (old) p3 box that ran an old version
of etch, needed a bunch of security updates and kde and some other
stuff installed last night. I got all the updates installed except for
two things - open office (not sure he'll be using it, he wanted squid
set up primarily) and there were some errors about not being able to
access or write some font directories.

Yeah, things like that can happen --- not very important maybe, but if
you happen not to be able to install or update exim or cyrus on the
mailserver over the weekend, it's not so nice when people come back to
work on Monday and find out that they can't read or send their emails.
And I'm talking about upgrading Sarge, involving switching from exim3 to
exim4 as well as switching to a newer version of cyrus that required to
convert all the mails to a differently organized format. Updating the
webserver from Potatoe to testing-after-Sarge some time after there
were no more security updates for Potatoe is also something you don't
exactly want to do (I didn't). Updating an early amd64 distribution on
the file server that was, at the time of installing, hosted on Alioth,
to the later amd64 that was an official release is pretty much
impossible.

So the point is that upgrading from one release to another one is a
leap that can not be undertaken lightly, if at all. That a stable
release does not break doesn't mean that upgrading from one stable
release to another doesn't break it. That is a problem you don't have
when you run testing and keep it updated. You may have other problems
running testing (I didn't), but if things really go wrong, you can
still update to unstable from there. What is best to use still depends
on the requirements, of course. If you really need it rock solid, run
stable and make plans how to perform the upgrade to the next stable
release.

Is there a way back, like from testing to stable or from unstable
to testing?

Anyway, I do have a lot of trust in Debian (maybe too much?).
Attributing stable as "rock solid" is quite an understatement,
considering that testing uses to be rock solid.


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