Fix for distupgrade from 14.04 to 16.04

[xor]

On Thursday, November 09, 2017 09:48:58 AM Benjamin Tegge wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 09.11.2017, 01:52 +0100 schrieb xor:
> > Unfortunately that text file is > 100 pages long nowadays!
> > It would end up taking half a year for me to find the time to
> > reconfigure a 
> > newly installed system.
> 
> What usually helps to reduce the required effort of a clean install on
> my systems is to do a diff of the backup of the old system and the new
> system from live media with Meld. I review the changes in /etc manually
> after I installed all the packages (same here, just compare and review
> the filtered output of `dpkg -l`), restore the data in /home and that
> usually goes smooth. It doesn't take me more than a day, probably a few
> hours more when I account planning, but it's pretty efficient compared
> to stories I heard from Mac or Windows users, particularly Macs.
> 
> Hope that helps understanding and planning your future disaster
> recovery.

Thank you but I *have* a full diff between a fresh install and my current 
configuration and that is the aforementioned handcrafted 100 page textfile.

Diff'ing the raw filesystem against the defaults will only ever be much longer 
than those 100 pages. I wrote that textfile to be as short as possible 
already.

And applying this will not by any means ever be possible within a day, it will 
take months.
You're not taking account for the fact that probably well over a hundred 
pieces of software will have the way they are configured changed in a thousand 
ways across a version difference of >2 years. I can't just copy over the 
settings on disk, that would break in a crazy amount of inacceptable 
horrendous ways. This is a production system, not just a gaming machine.

So reinstalling is absolutely no option for me, I need distupgrade to work :(

Still thanks for the effort though!