Mario Vukelic wrote:
On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 18:00 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
Ok, let me be blunt. At no time in my memory of many, many upgrades
across 2 desktops, 1 laptop, 2 rackmounts, 2 Xen VMs and 1 Virtosso VM has
Debian's method of upgrading ever left my machines *UNBOOTABLE*. *EVER*!
This is now the /third/ Unbuntu upgrade that has left my machine unbootable.
Yeah, well, bad luck. Of my ~15 Ubuntu upgrades, none left the machine
unbootable, and IIRC 1 or 2 left them without X. I also doubt that the
method of upgrading, if done right, has any effect on this - after all,
your new kernel doesn't boot, and it doesn't matter how it got there.
I was talking about the thousands of cases that _would make machines
unbootable if the Ubuntu target users were forced to upgrade the Debian
way. Do you not see the questions that are asked on this very list?
Uh-oh, I'm detecting the beginnings of a possible flame war here. This
ain't LKML or openbsd-devel, you know. :-)
I did a couple of Feisty-to-Gutsy upgrades "the Debian way," namely
tweaking /etc/apt/sources.list to read "gutsy" where it said "feisty".
Then,
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
and things Just Worked. Beautifully, matter of fact. Now, the
Gutsy-to-Hardy upgrade, I did according to the upgrade instructions on
www.ubuntu.com, and both times it worked exceedingly well.
Since Ubuntu is basically a snapshot of Debian Sid, I would expect this
way of upgrading to work just as well on an Ubuntu server as it would a
Debian server. Yes, I know, Ubuntu's a fork, it's not Debian proper.
But even Linspire made sure that apt-get wasn't broken.
It goes back to what I and a couple of others already mentioned. Which
one you choose depends on your personal preference. If you have good
experiences with Debian and like it, then stick with it. If you have
good experiences with Ubuntu and like it, same thing. My preference is
more shaped by CPU architecture support at this point, and that now
increasingly means Debian on my servers.
--TP
