[indiana-discuss] Re: 3.1) Installation

[Daniel Griffith]

On 6/13/07, Glynn Foster <Glynn.Foster at sun.com> wrote:

> "It should not be expected to support an upgrade skipping releases
> eg. A -> B -> C is supported, A -> C is not supported without an
> upgrade to B first."
>
> and in the end I was convinced that should be removed, especially since I
> believe Solaris supports upgrades from at least 2 releases behind. But the fact
> remains, what is the user expectation vs the potential for supporting that
> expectation?

I would say that someone _would_ have that expectation from a modern
distribution.

For example, on a Gentoo box that hadn't been updated since the
release 2005.0, to bring it up to date to the current release 2007.0
I'd just need to type:

# emerge -pvuD world

And all the new packages and dependences would be downloaded and
installed, 95% of the config files would be automagically merged
(letting me sort out things like Postfix's main.cf myself),  leaving
me with an identical system to a new install – all done live and
needing a restart to move to the new kernel (which normally is
configured manually).

Yeah ok ok, it can sometimes be not that simple, for example if you
just emerge world'ed a pre 2005 distribution and then left it running
on the old kernel life would get complicated due to the lack of udev,
but a decent package system surely would not depend on a monolithic
series of patches installed in the right order to bring a system up to
date...