[clug] Reinstall and reformat?
Rasjid Wilcox
rasjidw at openminddev.net
Fri Mar 19 11:59:18 GMT 2004
On Friday 19 March 2004 22:24, Sam Couter wrote:
> Rasjid Wilcox <rasjidw at openminddev.net> wrote:
> > Well, personally I reformat everything except /home and /usr/local when
> > doing that kind of upgrade, so I know that nothing from the old version
> > is left hanging around.
>
> I just apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade without worrying about
> what's stored where, which partitions are formatted, etc.
>
> Reformatting is for Windows systems. Silly rabbit.
This is why I, too, run Debian on servers.
I think I picked a bad time last time I tried Debian on the desktop (a while
ago now), and am so still on a rpm based system (SuSE). I have not tried a
SuSE upgrade yet, but I tried upgrading a RedHat system a couple of times,
and it never went smoothly, so with RH I recommend reformatting the system
directories during upgrade. Perhaps it is better now, but I suspect the
problems were (are?) due to a fundamental flaw in the rpm model.
To be fair however, I could generally get my system fully back to 'normal'
(with all config files adjusted) after an upgrade in under half an hour. Any
config file I had modified lived in /usr/local/etc/ with symlinks in /etc/ to
them. And at least my /home partition always remained untouched, and my
user-settings.
(Even if you have a D: drive under Windows, all your user-settings are in the
registry, which is well and truely gone after a reformat - which in my
experience generally should be done every 12 months or so even if you are not
upgrading the system.)
Cheers,
Rasjid.
--
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +11 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net
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