DVCS (was Re: Moving to D)

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2011-01-08 at 18:22 -0800, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> 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.

Personally I have never had an in-place Ubuntu upgrade f*** up any of my
machines -- server, workstation, laptops.  However, I really feel your
pain about video and audio tools on Ubuntu, these have regularly been
screwed over by an upgrade.  There are also other niggles:  my current
beef is that the 10.10 upgrade stopped my Lenovo T500 from going to
sleep when closing the lid.

On my laptops I have two system partitions so as to dual boot between
Debian Testing and the latest released Ubuntu.  This way I find I always
have a reasonably up to date system that works as I want it.  Currently
I am having a Debian Testing period pending 11.04 being released.

> > 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).

I always have /home as a separate partition as I dual boot between
Debian and Ubuntu from two distinct / partitions.  But I always upgrade
in place -- but having the dual boot makes for trivially easy recovery
from problems.

Debian Testing is really a rolling release but it tends to be behind
Ubuntu is some versions of things and ahead in others.  Also Ubuntu has
non-free stuff that is forbidden on Debian.  Not to mention the F$$$F$$
fiasco!  

> 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.

I have to agree about being two years behind, this is too far to be
comfortable.  I would definitely recommend an upgrade to Walter's
machines

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20110109/0f3b4f6b/attachment.pgp>