useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 30, 2012 17:42 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

The downside is that it means there are old configuration files around when you upgrade. That's OK if you make sure that the new version can't be tripped up by older configuration files, but that's apparently harder than it looks. This isn't terrible when you're upgrading only one application, since you have only one configuration to look through for incompatibilities, but it can be a pain when you're upgrading your whole distribution while trying to keep an old /home. My recent experience is that tracking down configuration incompatibilities takes more time on a distro upgrade than installing all the packages. It's still easier than completely recreating a configuration from scratch would be, but it's a definite area for improvement.