Let's talk upgrading, lifecycles, and Trisquel 4.5
- Login o registrati per inviare commenti
With the eventual release of Trisquel 6.0, many of us are going to upgrade whether is is from the 4.0 LTS or from 5.5. In Ubuntu, they have it so the update manager can do a direct LTS to LTS upgrade with no problem. Otherwise if you try to upgrade to a version at least two versions ahead (like from Ubuntu 10.04 to 11.04 or 11.10), the OS will probably break and I know because it has happened to me on the server level. It was so bad I had to do an install from scratch and was much more careful.
If there is no system in place to upgrade from 4.0 to 6.0, will we have to upgrade manually from each version? I'm talking about from 4.0 to 4.5 to 5.0 to 5.5 to 6.0 by running the update manager or doing an apt-get dist-upgrade in-between.
The reason I ask is that Ubuntu 10.10 will lose support from Canonical this April and Trisquel 4.5 is based on it. I'm guessing when that happens, the 4.5 repositories will be going as well. In a way it is unfair with the Trisquel releases being almost 4-5 months after the Ubuntu ones and the user loses 1/3 of the repository lifecyle from Ubuntu from the bat when they install that Trisquel release.
If users are going to have to do the incremental distribution upgrade, can we at least keep the older versions in an archive somewhere? That way the user can change to that temporarily when upgrading and won't have a gap in-between releases and be forced do clean install.
I am a member!
I think you have this confused in your head.
Trisquel 4.0.1 is the long term support release and it is based on Ubuntu 10.04 not 10.10. You are correct that 4.5 is based on 10.10 although since it isn't a long term support release you should be upgrading it at least once a year to maintain sync in order to be able to get security updates.
You should have continued upgrading to each new version if you installed 4.5. Which means you will need to upgrade to 5, and 5.5, and then 6. Once you are on 6 though I don't see any reason you can't stick with 6 for 3 years. There is a setting in the update manager to switch from the interim releases to only long term releases. The long term support releases have critical security updates for about 3 years.
New LTS releases are available every 2 years for Ubuntu. All that means is you will have time to upgrade from one Trisquel LTS release to another without worrying about security updates being temporarily unavailable despite Trisquel having a delay of as much as 6 months.
While you won't have quite as long to upgrade from one LTS release to the next before those security updates stop coming you will still have plenty of time to do the upgrade. Probably around 6 months.
I'm not confused. The point of an LTS is a long term release which means I get 3-5 years of support instead of the 18 months of the standard release. People especially use an LTS for their web servers and many use them for their desktop to get a stable release for their home or work computer.
Other Ubuntu based distros like Linux Mint don't use the Update Manager shared by Ubuntu and Trisquel and sometimes even doing a dist-upgrade from one release to the next can cause issues. They recommend wiping the drive and starting from scratch with each release but I can understand why some people want to update the system through apt instead. That is why I wouldn't really recommend Linux Mint for a person that wants to use it for an extended period of time and wants easy upgrades.
I know that Canonical uses the non-LTS releases as a way to test out experimental features, but they work very hard in making sure their LTS releases are solid and will often remove things they don't see 100% stable from the LTS release. It is also nice that they release updated ISOs for the LTS versions which are point releases with updated packaging and would be awesome if Trisquel did as well.
If you said it would be ok to do an LTS to LTS upgrade and the update manager is setup for that like in Ubuntu, then you have eased my worries.
I am a member!
Personally, I dropped the concept of distribution upgrade in favor of package
upgrade, and by that, I mean that I manually edit the sources.list with the
repositories that I see fit (taranis=>dagda) and I let synaptic upgrade the
packages; as long as the new versions are coming from a tested/stable
repository it should be fine.
I am no expert so I can't say if it is more efficient but for me it
simplified the options and I haven't had any troubles.
I'm not confused. The point of an LTS is a long term release which means I
get 3-5 years of support instead of the 18 months of the standard release.
People especially use an LTS for their web servers and many use them for
their desktop to get a stable release for their home or work computer.
Other Ubuntu based distros like Linux Mint don't use the Update Manager
shared by Ubuntu and Trisquel and sometimes even doing a dist-upgrade from
one release to the next can cause issues. They recommend wiping the drive and
starting from scratch with each release but I can understand why some people
want to update the system through apt instead. That is why I wouldn't really
recommend Linux Mint for a person that wants to use it for an extended period
of time and wants easy upgrades.
I know that Canonical uses the non-LTS releases as a way to test out
experimental features, but they work very hard in making sure their LTS
releases are solid and will often remove things they don't seem 100% stable
from the LTS release.
If you said it would be ok to do an LTS to LTS upgrade and the update manager
is setup for that like in Ubuntu, then you have eased my worries.
I am a member!
Personally, I dropped the concept of distribution upgrade in favor of package upgrade, and by that, I mean that I manually edit the sources.list with the repositories that I see fit (taranis=>dagda) and I let synaptic upgrade the packages; as long as the new versions are coming from a tested/stable repository it should be fine.
I am no expert so I can't say if it is more efficient but for me it simplified the options and I haven't had any troubles.
I believe it is basically what the dist-upgrade does. Maybe it does some more work that is useful and that you miss. Why don't you want to upgrade the distribution in the "normal" way?
I am a member!
Well, all thou I haven't tested with the latest Trisquel's, as t3g pointed out earlier, there were/are (at least with other distro's) problems when one tries both upgrading and skipping one or more releases, with the 'proper tools'.
I'm not saying that the normal way is bad or anything, just that is simpler to both upgrade and skip one or more releases; by upgrading the packages using whatever repository you want.
Also, since I'm not using the Trisquel default desktop(s) and I'm 'significantly' personalizing my Trisquel experience I doubt that I can 'miss' that much by not using the normal way.
I am a member!
Well, all thou I haven't tested with the latest Trisquel's, as t3g pointed
out earlier, there were/are (at least with other distro's) problems when one
tries both upgrading and skipping one or more releases, with the 'proper
tools'.
I'm not saying that the normal way is bad or anything, just that is simpler
to both upgrade and skip one or more releases; by upgrading the packages
using whatever repository you want.
Also, since I'm not using the Trisquel default desktop(s) and I'm
'significantly' personalizing my Trisquel experience I doubt that I can
'miss' that much by not using the normal way.
- Login o registrati per inviare commenti