Craig Sanders <[email protected]> writes:
> or on ubuntu, there's a wrapper script called 'do-release-upgrade'. not
> really sure what, if any, benefit it has over 'apt-get dist-upgrade' but
> it's there all the same. automatically updates the sources.list to the
> latest alliterated animal at least, and probably other stuff.
Debian has release notes. For example, anyone doing a simple
"dist-upgrade" from Squeeze to Wheezy is likely to completely bugger
their system due to apt blowing its heap trying to find an ordering
("could not perform immediate configuration"). Anyone that follows the
release notes FIRST can allegedly avoid this, but once it's happened
repairing it is allegedly hard.
Ubuntu knows their users can't read, so instead they use d-r-u, which
basically downlaods a tarball of filthy little kludges to workaround
upgrade issues.
I'm extremely unenthusiastic about the latter approach because I believe
it ends up being used to try to auto-detect things that it can't get
100% right, so unusual systems explode on upgrade. I also believe this
negatively impacts the quantity and quality of upgrade notes.
OTOH, it has been pointed out that d-r-u's approach would have allowed
the DDs to avoid the immediate-configuration issue entirely, because
d-r-u's tarball exists outside the repo, so what it downloads is the
current version, rather than what existed as at squeeze.
Overall, I think it's reasonable to use a d-r-u approach in moderation,
for things that you can reliably detect and fix, AND can't be fixed fix
in-band with NMUs. Things that might require human judgement in edge
cases should continue to be documented in the release notes.
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