DVCS (was Re: Moving to D)

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday 08 January 2011 14:34:19 Walter Bright wrote:
> Michel Fortin wrote:
> > I know you had your reasons, but perhaps it's time for you upgrade to a
> > more recent version of Ubuntu? That version is what comes with Hardy
> > Heron (april 2008).
> > <https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/meld>
> 
> I know. The last time I upgraded Ubuntu in place it f****d up my system so
> bad I had to wipe the disk and start all over. It still won't play videos
> correctly (the previous Ubuntu worked fine), the rhythmbox music player
> never worked again, it wiped out all my virtual boxes, I had to spend
> hours googling around trying to figure out how to reconfigure the display
> driver so the monitor worked again, etc.
> 
> I learned my lesson! Yes, I'll eventually upgrade, but I'm not looking
> forward to it.

A while back I took to putting /home on a separate partition from the root 
directory, and I never upgrade in place. I replace the whole thing every time. 
Maybe it's because I've never trusted Windows to do it correctly, but I've never 
thought that it was a good idea to upgrade in place. I never do it on any OS. 
And by having /home on its own partition, it doesn't affect my data. Sometimes, 
config files can be an issue, but worse case, that's fixed by blowing them away. Of 
course, I use neither Ubuntu nor Gnome, so I don't know what the exact caveats 
are with those. And at the moment, I'm primarily using Arch, which has rolling 
releases, so unless I screw up my machine, I pretty much don't have to worry 
about updating the OS to a new release. The pieces get updated as you go, and it 
works just fine (unlike Gentoo, where you can be screwed on updates because a 
particular package didn't build).

Of course, I'd have got nuts having an installation as old as yours appears to 
be, so we're obviously of very different mindsets when dealing with upgrades. 
Still, I'd advise making /home its own partition and then doing clean installs 
of the OS whenever you upgrade.

- Jonathan M Davis