William Hubbs wrote:
On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 09:08:53AM -0500, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
On 11:26 Fri 01 Jul , Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
Except for the fact that while you upgrade, you still have a usable
system. Reinstallation means a massive time-sink during which your
machine is completely unusable. This is not an option for a lot of
people.
If -user is regularly giving that kind of advice, I think you guys are
making a huge mistake.
I'm not going to support this kind of max-6-month-upgrade life cycle
for Gentoo. We're effectively driving our users away to distros like
Ubuntu that allow you to upgrade every LTS release instead of
constantly or every 6 months.
In my experience, updates become massively difficult after about 6
months unless you have deep expertise in Gentoo. You run into blocker
after blocker after USE-flag problem after resolution failure and an
ongoing series of confusing messages with no apparent end in sight. We
may call it supported (and technically, we're right) but it isn't
realistically possible for most users.
Right. I can't tell you how many times I've seen on -user where someone
comes back after not upgrading for longer than 6 months and finds
themselves in a very tricky situation.
Since we have a council decision that says the migration path has to
exist for a year, that's what I'll follow. However, if someone waits a
year to upgrade a gentoo system, things will have changed so much that
the upgrade process will be challenging for them to say the least,
unless they know gentoo very well.
William
I been using Gentoo since about 2003, old 1.4 days, and I wouldn't try
to upgrade after six months unless there has been very few major
changes. I may would sync and see what it looks like but if I see
several blockers or some major upgrade, like expat if I recall
correctly, then it would be a fresh install for me. So, I'm a long time
Gentoo user and I been around the block a few times and I certainly know
where to get help, but even with all that between my ears, I still say
it is faster to start over. If in say the past three months there have
been a few major upgrades, I would do the same. If in 9 months it has
just been "normal" upgrades, then I would try it. It all depends on
what has changed and how much time it would take to work through the
problem.
Now if you have some very complicated server setup, then that may be
different. At that point you would have to put in the balance what is
easier and faster, upgrade or re-install. Generally, emerge -ep world |
genlop -p plus time to configure everything again versus time needed to
work through the upgrade, which there is no certainty of. That's the
balance. Having the world file and some needed files from /etc would
make things a lot faster too.
Balance. Just don't fall off the scale. lol
Dale
:-) :-)
