Upgrade is risky [LWN.net]

Upgrade is risky

Posted Nov 27, 2008 11:41 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Asian Tour

I've implemented upgrades - it takes a disproportionate amount of effort to get it right (about 5-10% of the total development time) and it runs only once. So it's a hard task and very easy to get it wrong. However, lots of Linux distributions force their users to do an upgrade once or twice a year. Is this a wise thing to do? It's hard to lobby for an OS that breaks twice a year...

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Upgrade is risky

Posted Nov 27, 2008 12:04 UTC (Thu) by cmot (subscriber, #53097) [Link]

Let's just note here that this confirms my impression that the unnamed
Linux distribution is opitimised for new installations, whereas its older
relative puts more effort into testing that upgrades are handled in a sane
way (and, in my experience, succeeds quite well at that, too.) It also
does not try to release twice a year, but more like once every two years.
(Yes, the feature junkies won't use stable, but for those who just need to
do their daily work this works out quite well.)

Upgrade is risky

Posted Dec 4, 2008 22:08 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

Well, when I upgraded my laptop to Debian Lenny several weeks ago, I too had an issue with the external display, as well as an issue with the WLAN setup. However, both issues seem to come from regres^Wfunctionality changes in the upstream software, so Debian can be excused. OTOH, Debian is to blame for the fact that this really bad upgrade problem still happened over two months later; I hope they fix it before the release.

Upgrade is (often) a useless timewaster

Posted Nov 27, 2008 21:19 UTC (Thu) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]

Go for an Enterprise Linux (RHEL, SLES, CentOS) and use your Linux distribution for up to 7 years without needing to replace everything every 6 to 12 months...

If it works and it is important that it keeps working, don't change it. If you want to experiment, do it on another box or virtualized.

Sure some people want or need the latest and greatest software, and they can bear the suffering (or even spend the time fixing and sending upstream). But there is no point asking the same from the 99% of non-technical users for whom computers are a means, and not the goal.

Upgrade is (often) a useless timewaster

Posted Nov 28, 2008 12:14 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Unfortunately I've seen some of those enterprise and long-term-support Linuxes and the "if it works" condition didn't really hold, e.g. gaim crashed if it wanted to play any sound, youtube didn't work, etc.

In one sense the Linux distribution model is great, because one can get all software from one place and they (are supposed to) work well together. On the other hand applications are sometimes too thightly coupled together, if one needs a new version (to fix a bug) of an application, due to dependency issues a whole lot of other applications have to be updated (which is bound to introduce new bugs). I mean I don't think that a new Winamp on Windows will ever make me install a new MSN, but I'm not that sure about a new audacious bringing on a new pidgin. It's hard enough to make one application relatively bugfree, but it's much harder to do it with a whole distribution.

Anyway, it's just ranting...