On Sunday 08 October 2017 at 03:34:00, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 09:20:18 -0300
>
> "Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI" <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Since I updated my Debian Wheezy to Devuan Jessie I am unable to
> > access USB drives to store data.
>
> My experience is that upgrading between major versions is a probable
> fail, so why in the world would anyone upgrade between distros?
Because it's documented as a reasonable thing to do on Devuan.org's front
page?
"Devuan Jessie provides continuity as a safe upgrade path from Debian 7
(Wheezy) and a flawless switch from Debian 8 (Jessie)"
> > Is there a way to move from Devuan Jessie to Debian Jessie without
> > catching the systemd pox ?
>
> Yeah. Back up, lay down fresh Devuan Jessie, and restore your data.
The question was about moving from *Devuan* Jessie to *Debian* Jessie.
I've never tried this, so I don't know the answer (but I've done several
machines from Debian Wheezy to Devuan Jessie without problems).
> A known state is wonderful. That's why GIT defines the state after
> every commit. By the time you replace your worn out Debian Wheezy, you
> have no idea what kind of state your system is in. And Devuan can't be
> expected to sort all that out for you. Not really.
Whilst version control is a wonderful thing, and I can't disagree with your
comments, this is far more extreme than most sysadmins are going to do in
practice, and migrating from one distro to another (Debian Wheezy to Jessie,
or Debian Wheezy to Devuan Jessie) really is done every day by plenty of
people without problems.
> Yes, I know, I know, a dozen people will stand up right now and shout
> that their major upgrades always work and they haven't had to backup,
> format, install fresh and restore data since Debian 3.0,
Glad you expected one, at least :)
> and the only reason they had to do that was because. OK fine, for sure for
> sure, they got lucky.
No, it's a supported part of the Debian package management system which people
have been using and appreciating for a very long time.
> And they have little understanding of what bizarre config file contraptions
> are wiring together their modern software with deprecated wierdness.
They don't need to understand this when a package management system deals with
it for them.
> Anyone this allergic to a fresh install should be using a rolling release.
By which I assume you mean something like Gentoo, where you can never be sure
you have two machines with the same setup, because there's no way to know
quite what you have on different servers which were upgraded on different days?
> And perhaps the most important, they annually missed opportunities to do
> spring cleaning and get that box in a state they can understand.
Now that is certainly good advice.
> Respect your time and mental energy: Back up, format, install fresh,
> then VERY SELECTIVELY restore data, and I mean data, not config. To
> redo config, go in the new file and type in values, looking at the old
> file for guidance if needed. You'll have a solid Devuan.
Yes, you will, and you'll have taken so long over the process that if this is
a work machine, your boss will wonder what the hell you've been doing for the
past week, and will not condone doing the same thing to the other 42 servers.
Antony.
--
Bill Gates has personally assured the Spanish Academy that he will never allow
the upside-down question mark to disappear from Microsoft word-processing
programs, which must be reassuring for millions of Spanish-speaking people,
though just a piddling afterthought as far as he's concerned.
- Lynne Truss, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"
Please reply to the list;
please *don't* CC me.
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