On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 13:45 +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > in which numerous respondents say that Debian and Gentoo
Those are the two that I have experience with upgrading over long time periods. Relevant to this discussion, I had one Debian upgrade continuously from 1998-2003 and a Gentoo system live and upgrading from time to time from 2002-present. Excellent success with both. To me, there is an important consideration: stable or unstable. In Debian's case, if all you ever do is run their stable releases, then you will find their upgrades smooth indeed. They are very focused on this. On the other hand, if you're needing more up to date code, I'd give Gentoo the nod. Because it is building locally as it goes, you are more likely to have everything just fit together. An instantaneous moment of bliss, to be sure, but it does seem to work out well over the long term that each such brief rebuild occasion results in a nice stable ticking-along system. [Frankly, I give credit to the free software universe as a whole, not to any particular distro. The combination of some distros pumping the leading edge and shaking out initial problems, others pulling bugfixes in from the enterprise installations, and things like GNOME and KDE working together (sic) through freedesktop and utoptia and other projects, practices, release cycles, and interaction have coalescing into a whole where everyone quickly benefits from the experiences of the others] Of course, Gentoo doesn't have releases, per se (they cut a bunch of install CDs with lots of precompiled packages to get you bootstrapped a few times a year), but in a continuous "upgrade something when I need it and rely on minimum version requirements expressed in the packages to cause deeper upgrades to happen when necessary" mode, it's been very reliable. What it means is that my attention is focused on the thing I'm upgrading, and the base system (whatever that might happen to be) is largely left alone to tick along. I wrote an article in Linux Journal last year about it, see: http://www.operationaldynamics.com/reference/articles/GentooUnusual/ if interested. > Perfectly smoothly? No. The only way you're going to get that is a blank system fresh install of something like RHEL, SUSE, or maybe someday Ubuntu where stuff has been extensively tested. And even then, it's "out of date" and frozen in time, so you don't gain a whole lot that way if, for whatever reason, you need a newer version that what your OS is currently providing. Really, the issue boils down to skill set - if you have the skills to watch for, detect, analyze, and resolve issues, then you're going to be fine on the continously upgrading testing/unstable distro versions (Fedora rawhide, Ubuntu whatever, Debian unstable, Gentoo unstable, etc). If you just don't have time for that sort of thing, then, to be perfectly honest, the strategy you have adopted of getting a system installed, configured and then leaving it alone for a long time is a fine one indeed. Nothing like actually getting on with using your computer to be productive as opposed to using all your productivity just to keep a damn computer running. AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Website: http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Blog: http://research.operationaldynamics.com/blogs/andrew/ GPG key: 0945 9282 449C 0058 1FF5 2852 2D51 130C 57F6 E7BD Sydney: 02 9977 6866 Mobile: 04 1079 6725 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
