[ale] re-installs versus upgrades [was: Re: X wants nvidialibraries]

[Steve Brown]

I have been going the upgrade route with one of my boxen at home (from
Dapper to current), and that seems to be going fine. There was one problem,
with evdev if I remember correctly, but that was easily remedied by visiting
the forums. Other boxes of mine that have gone through the same process have
not been as easy, and I went ahead and re-installed to save myself some
time. I have had bad luck with Ubuntu's upgrade manager gui. Before going
through the whole process, in case I have to re-install from scratch, I will
create a file that has all of the packages installed with:

dpkg --get-selections > myfiles

And then, should anything happen where you need to reinstall, you can
reinstall the packages with

dpkg --set-selections < myfiles
and then you run dselect.

Since /etc is usually pretty small, I save that to my backup partition and
refer back to it should I need to do some reconfiguring. /home of course is
on its own partition, and I haven't run into a problem yet with different
versions of applications using the files differently. And thank you dkg for
the link, it has quite a few additional tips for preparing to upgrade the
OS.

-SteveB
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