Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30 [LWN.net]

Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Mar 30, 2006 9:20 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (subscriber, #143)
In reply to: Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30 by sbergman27
Parent article: Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

> No OS upgrade is ever completely painless.

I'm going to call you sadly misinformed on that one. I've done a number of OS upgrades that were completely painless! The oldest one that I can recall for sure was the upgrade from DOS 3.1 to 3.2. But there have been others, before and since. They may be rare, but they happen.

I would, however, agree with the proposition that no OS upgrade can ever be guaranteed to be painless or should ever be expected to be painless. But I will say that Debian has, on average, been less painful to upgrade than most other systems I've used (a fairly large number). A couple of Debian upgrades (in the early days) were even that semi-mythical beast, the painless upgrade. I realize that's anecdotal evidence, but it's valid to me.

In any case, he didn't say Debian, he said Debian-based systems. We're taling about Ubuntu here, which is a Debian-based system, and the whole point of Ubuntu was to provide more frequent and predictable releases than Debian has been. So complaining about Debian's release schedule is missing the point entirely!

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Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Mar 30, 2006 15:05 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

Well, you can call me stupid. Or you can call me incompetent. Or you say I don't learn from my mistakes. But misinformed is off the mark. I've done too many upgrades in a production environment for that. ;-)

Your points are well taken. But in the end it is actaully you who are missing the point of my post.

It is not my intent to start a big flame-war, or even a debate upon the matter.

It's just that there are so many short, misleading posts from Debian fans suggesting that Debian and Debian based distros are Nirvana. And if it gets said with enough frequency without being challenged, people actually start believing their own propaganda, and that's not good.

I make it a point to say something when I see short posts suggesting that Debian has no upgrade problems, or is the only distro that doesn't have dependency hell.

Please don't take this post as being in an argumentative tone, btw.

My main goal is to difuse misinformation, and not to trash Debian, which is an important component of our FL/OSS ecosystem.

And now, to change the subject slightly...

I've personally found it interesting watching the Debian project start to come to terms with the first really successful Debian based distro that is not Debian proper. Previously, the Debian project itself has always called the shots in the Debian province. Now we have top notch Debian based Distro who's creators have ideas of their own. And the Debian project has something that it has never had before: competition right in its own back yard. The good news is that I think they have mostly gotten through the denial phase.

And my God, look how long this post has grown! I'll stop now. ;-)