Fresh install?

[Derek Broughton]

Ric Moore wrote:

> On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 17:47 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> Ric Moore wrote:
> 
>> > When I tried updating to FC5 from FC4 UDEV broke horribly
>> 
>> Let's not compare apples to oranges.  An Ubuntu (or any Debian-based
>> distro) upgrade is nothing like a Fedora upgrade.
> 
> How so? People make mistakes 15% of the time as a statistical average.
> Mistakes will happen. To me there is far less chance of breakage if I
> install clean, then add the bits I need from my old install to the new
> one, at my speed, that are not included in the new install (original
> work). So, I don't see an Apple VS Oranges here. 

Really?  Now you're throwing in pears as well.  What's next, peaches? :-)

Seriously, I was talking about the _vast_ difference between a Redhat-style
upgrade and a Debian-style upgrade.  I'm still too intimidated to move that
@#$%^ Centos server to version 5, but I've been doing dist-upgrades to
Debian-based systems since I was a newbie - a decade ago.  _That_ pro/con
discussion is not really at all related to whether or not clean installs
are better than upgrades.  I imagine there are probably yum users who think
apt is scary, too, but the point is that the issue with *ubuntu is whether
to do a clean install or an apt-based upgrade, and whether upgrading Fedora
is safe is definitely a red herring.

>> > Plus, I find a
>> > clean install to be quicker from DVD than eating up my satellite.
>> 
>> If you've got a DVD, you can do an upgrade too, so that's not a valid
>> argument.
> 
> I don't get that. Upgrading and Installing Clean are two different
> approaches. 

Of course they are, but you said that one reason to do a clean install was
because you couldn't afford the network bandwidth (I'm on a satellite too,
so I feel your pain), and I'm saying that if you already have a DVD you can
do an upgrade from it just as simply as a clean install, so bandwidth is a
poor argument.

> With the former you are shoe-horning new packages into and 
> over top of an old install. With the latter there is no trace of the
> former install, at all. 

If there's "no trace" of an old install, I see no point in doing it.  I've
spent 15 years assembling this mass of materials (some of it coming from
pre-Windows days) and I want to keep it.  The beauty of a clean install on
Linux is that I _can_ do that, because programs, configuration, and data
are all separate.  The beauty of an upgrade is that I can (usually) do it
faster.
-- 
derek