[H-GEN] Upgrading Debian from Potato

[Greg Black]

On 2006-02-18, Geoff Shang wrote:

> I have a box here running Potato.  The box at the other end of the table is 
> running Woody, and a third box is going to have Sarge installed in the 
> coming days.  This seems rather silly to me, so I've decided it's time I 
> upgraded everything to Sarge.
> 
> This should go easily with Woody.  There are clear steps on debian.org for 
> doing this, including upgrading Aptitude first, etc.  but I'm not so sure 
> about the Potato box.

This answer is not about the specific question or about doing
this with Debian, but it is the general answer about upgrading
that serves me well, regardless of the operating system or the
distance of the jump.

In general, upgrading is a poorly-understood operation and it
provides a large number of opportunities for mysterious foot
shooting episodes.  As a rule, unless there are peculiar
operational constraints or you have the skills, perseverance and
time to deal with the potential problems, it's far better to
follow the much safer process of doing a fresh install:

  * backup all your data to alternate media or to another box
  * do a full fresh install of the new OS
  * configure and test the new OS
  * restore your data

Once you have accomplished that reliably for one box, you have
acquired the knowledge to make it go much faster for the others
and you will be able to use the installation on the first box to
complete the job on the others if they are the same architecture
and if you have thought about this before starting the initial
install.  (E.g., you might use a separate partition for the OS
and additional packaged software, so that you could do a minimal
install on the other boxes to get them to boot and then use
rsync to do the rest of the work in one easy step.)

As a final note, I know that my approach is not universally
chosen and that lots of people have, at some time in their
lives, successfully upgraded.  However, I submit the above as a
more generally reliable approach.  Of course, if you want to try
an upgrade, then that's your decision of course.

Cheers, Greg