Upgrading? Re-installing [LWN.net]

Upgrading? Re-installing

Posted Mar 26, 2008 17:17 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Ubuntu 6.10 reaches end-of-life on April 26, 2008 by muwlgr
Parent article: Ubuntu 6.10 reaches end-of-life on April 26, 2008

Yes, it left me a bit alarmed actually at first when I saw it described.

But it appears that what they're talking about as an "upgrade" actually flushes everything on
the system, and this is a feature which changes that to optionally not destroy /home.

So it's not like an ordinary operating system upgrade at all, it seems like it would be more
useful for "sidegrades", throwing away the OS but keeping the data. I don't know if that means
Ubuntu doesn't provide a mechanism for routine "same OS, newer version" upgrades, or just some
users don't like the potential for build-up of "cruft" (e.g. after five years of Red Hat
upgrades I had some obsolete binaries in /usr/bin/ that were so old my kernel wouldn't run
them, but the package manager had never actually deleted them)

Personally I've been very happy with upgrades of Red Hat and Fedora on multiple systems over
the years. They haven't always worked smoothly, but they were definitely less painful than
re-installing everything.

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upgrading & (re)installing

Posted Mar 26, 2008 19:08 UTC (Wed) by undefined (guest, #40876) [Link]

ok, to straighten out the confusion...

ubuntu only officially supports upgrading between consecutive versions.

to move from 6.10 to, the latest, 7.10 you have two options:
1. "upgrade" from 6.10 to 7.04 and then upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10
2. "install" 7.10 over 6.10 where /home will be preserved but /etc won't

ubuntu does not officially support "apt-get dist-upgrade" to upgrade to a later version
(whether the next incremental version or not). ubuntu only officially supports using update
manager (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading) to perform an upgrade.

i figure the reason is insufficient testing of upgrades. debian puts a lot of emphasis on
upgrading between stable releases, but that only happens every year or two (overlooking sarge
;-) and is only expected to be between consecutive stable releases. that's relatively easy as
compared to testing the upgrade process to the current ubuntu release from every currently
supported version (usually 3 versions supported concurrently with the last one being dropped
about the time a new one is released) and repeating this every 6 months.

the feature of the installer to install a new arbitrary version of ubuntu while preserving
/home (which on ubuntu by default is on the same partition as everything else) is appreciated.
ubuntu works well out-of-the-box for the average desktop user, so reinstalling ubuntu is
generally painless as there's little (re)configuring required. so instead of spending the
time & bandwidth upgrading twice to get from 6.10 to 7.10 (or three times if you hold out a
month or so for 8.04), you can just install the version you want over the top and it won't
trash your user-specific configuration & data.

i'm curious if ubuntu is going to support upgrading between LTS releases (6.06 to 8.04) or if
the upgrade process will remain unchanged (6.06 -> 6.10 -> 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04, whew!). i
figure the main user of LTS releases are businesses/corporations, where it's currently
standard practice with windows to just refresh/reimage/reinstall the computer and manually
preserve/copy the user's data & config, so maybe ubuntu/canonical isn't going to put any
effort into insuring a smooth easy upgrade between LTS releases (though windows does ;-).

i have a desktop running 7.04 (the latest version available when i built it last summer) and
i'll probably install 8.04 from scratch to put everything on lvm and create a logical volume
for /home (if it's not already that way; can't remember). after that i'll "install" LTS
releases to avoid the pain of multiple upgrades and as ubuntu has required very little
tweaking after installation (and the user data & config should be safe on the separate logical
volume for /home).

upgrading & (re)installing

Posted Mar 27, 2008 4:10 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Just curious... Is /usr/local preserved in any of these upgrades/"sidegrades"? How about /opt? Thanks!

upgrading & (re)installing

Posted Mar 27, 2008 10:42 UTC (Thu) by jonasj (guest, #44344) [Link]

i'm curious if ubuntu is going to support upgrading between LTS releases (6.06 to 8.04) or if the upgrade process will remain unchanged (6.06 -> 6.10 -> 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04, whew!

It will. Ubuntu supports upgrades from any release to the release immediately following it, as well as from any LTS release to the LTS release immediately following it. People running 6.06 will see an Upgrade button in their update manager when 8.04 is released, just like people running 7.10 will.