Minor vs. Major upgrade
Posted Oct 3, 2003 15:04 UTC (Fri) by
PolarWolf (guest, #8280)
Parent article:
The Great Package Management Experiment
It looks like the reviewer only did an minor release upgrade for all the aforementioned distributions. I couldn't quite deduce it from the Mandrake bit, but that also smells like a minor release upgrade.
Debian:
Reviewer only did an apt-get dist-upgrade, which is 1) wrong (for a minor upgrade, you want to use a plain apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, and 2) useless without an "apt-get update" before, but I assume the reviewer did that but forgot to mention it. A major release upgrade would also involve editing /etc/apt/sources.list to reflect a change from e.g. "stable" to "testing". Then followed by the afore mentioned apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade.
Debian handles a major release from one stable tree to a new stable tree (e.g. potato to woody) gracefully, and usually without problems. Going from "stable" to "unstable" _can_ involve some more work, personally I seldomly have problems.
Mandrake:
Reviewer went to from an $undef release to a Cooker release without much problems. I assume it's 9.0 to 9.2 in this case, which should indeed go without problems. Want to stress the update procedure? Try to go from 8 to 9.
RedHat:
Same deal. 9.0 to RAwhide isn't that exiting unless you stumble upon broken packages. RPM based distributions are notorious for their lack of upgrade path, usually involving reinstallation between major releases.
SlackWare:
As we say on IRC: "You don't upgrade slackware, you attempt to install something, and then fix whatever the crap broke". 'Nuff said, don't bother flaming. Volkerding's comment about package management says it all. It will always be a niche distribution.
SuSe:
Too bad there wasn't a new version available. This would have been IMO the most interresting upgrade of the lot as that would indeed involve a major release upgrade. Oh well, better luck next time.
In short: The upgrading bit of this article for the various distributions lacks. If the author would include a major release upgrade of each distribution too, it would have been a very good article to slap people 'round the ears with, in case the discussion comes up.
I want to thank you for putting in the effort to look into this issue though.
PS: I'm a Debian user. If I need to install an RPM, I use "alien" to convert from one format to the other. Beats having an RPM database lying around, which, btw, debian also support.
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