[ale] Ubuntu help

Michael B. Trausch mike at trausch.us
Mon Jan 26 02:01:05 EST 2009


On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:36:15 -0500
Brian Pitts <brian at polibyte.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-01-25 at 22:14 -0500, James Sumners wrote:
> > I call BS on that. Ubuntu is derivative of Debian. Unless they have
> > royally screwed up apt, then editing the sources.list and doing
> > `apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade` will upgrade any older
> > version to any newer version.  
> 
> Strangely, dist-upgrade isn't a supported upgrade method between
> versions of Ubuntu. My understanding is that apt wasn't able to
> smoothly handle all of the changes from one distribution to another,
> so they built their own tools- update-manager for the desktop and
> do-release-upgrade for the server.

I've never heard that---I've done it myself without any issues, up to
the last release anyway.  I used Update Manager going from Hardy to
Intrepid just to see how that went, which went alright as well.

Looking at the Update Manager, it looks like it uses APT to do the
upgrade so that it can provide better GUI feedback.  I'd be interested
to see what the differences between a dist-upgraded and an Update
Manager upgraded system are, maybe I'll do that in a VM at some point
and see what happens, just for curiosity.

Sometimes you do have to do some manual patchwork afterward, but that's
an upstream bug in Debian, not original to Ubuntu:

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=267289

Maybe that's why they prefer telling users to use the Update Manager.

	--- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
http://www.trausch.us/
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