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

Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

Posted Apr 1, 2006 11:15 UTC (Sat) by grouch (guest, #27289)
In reply to: Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30 by sbergman27
Parent article: Ubuntu 'Warty' to go unsupported on April 30

I'm gonna call foul on that BS. No OS upgrade is ever completely painless. And Debian? Wasn't it just 8 months ago that Debian asked its Debian Stable users to jump from all the packages in its 2002 release to the new 2005 packages. That's 3.5 years of package upgrades. You can't tell me that didn't cause a few problems. And please, please don't tell me that I should have been using Debian Testing.

Huh? Are you saying that you do not maintain your system, that you instead sit on some static "release" until the next one comes along?

Anyone who "jump[s]" from one release to the next is begging for trouble. Anyone who lets a connected system go 3.5 years without an upgrade is rolling some loaded dice.

Weekly upgrades seem reasonable for typical home systems. It's not that hard to do 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' on a regular basis (or use Synaptic or other GUI thingy, if you prefer). There is really no excuse to "jump from all the packages in its 2002 release to the new 2005 packages". That is so utterly silly that it suggests you are either completely unaware of how things work, or distorting reality to try to fit it into a bizarre argument, or had temporary brain disconnect when you typed that.

Moving from one "release" to the next in a Debian-based system is just one more step on a continuous stairway. I have one computer at home which has "stable" in its sources.list and the way that I know when it goes from one "release" to the next is by reading about it afterwards at places like LWN. The routine, weekly upgrades are incremental steps. It's more of a disruption when I change custom kernels than when Debian stamps a release as stable. The only big problem I remember running into was when "Potato" went stable (that was before Woody, which was before Sarge). I had installed X from source and managed to munge up my package management. It recovered from my mistakes fairly gracefully, considering.

You just don't wipe out a working Debian system and pop in the next "release" CD. That's just silly playing, not sensible usage.

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