EOL of Warty?

[John]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
>

>>>however: it is clearly stated that upgrades skipping a release
>>>are not supported[*] so you could have known in advance that when
>>>you decide to upgrade, you need to do it in steps.

Perhaps I should have known, but I didn't.

>>
>>This will be in the Warty EOL announcement, to remind people.
> 
> 
> But I used to word "update", you are talking about "upgrades". Like a 
> typical pedantic engineer, I see a difference. The GGP mentioned 
> infrequent updates on his wife's machine, I responded that it's not 
> unreasonable to expect him to do updates maximally six months apart, 
> so that doing an upgrade (if he wants to) to the next OS is 
> relatively easy.

I'm on a modem, it will not happen. If I could go direcly from Warty to 
Dapper, that's what would happen. As I cannot, Wife will get something 
else that I can upgrade less frequently.

I'd not expect an enterprise user to follow your path either, I can't 
imagine a sysadmin willingly upgrading to consecutive releases over 
hundreds or thousands of computers.

> An engineering policy of not supporting upgrades over skipped releases 
> is totally sensible. Trying to do it would be near impossible - the 
> dev team can provide miracles, but the impossible is still a tad out 
> of our reach.
> 

Red Hat and Fedora have always supported this, and least since the 
introduction of Anaconda, replacing the previous installer. It is true, 
however, that there can be some difficulties as some packages (eg wu-*) 
are replaced with alternatives, and I still have a RHL 7.3 box I must 
one day upgrade to something newer.