A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

> In my experience, dist-upgrade is more often problematic than not. I
> recently tried taking a laptop through 6.06->8.04->8.10 (I could only
> find a 6.06 CD on hand). LTS to LTS to current should be flawless; I
> had to do command-line stuff with apt-get to get it to work smoothly.
> That's just not good enough.
>   
Aye to that! However, to be fair, even Centos/RHEL encounter problems 
doing upgrades between point releases (4.3->4.4)

> I recently had to disrecommend Ubuntu on servers at work because the
> desktop dist-upgrade just isn't up to scratch IME, and that just
> doesn't bode well enough for servers. (Instead we're using
> RHEL/CentOS, which doesn't do the equivalent well at all, but *does*
> have seven years of maintenance. If we were going to do it, I'd
> probably go Debian plus hand-installed binaries. But RHEL/CentOS is
> easier on this score.)
>   
I come from RHEL/Centos and certain toolchains have yet to have a 
parallel in quality in Ubuntu/Debian. Maybe I should give fai a try...
> Debian famously manages dist-upgrades flawlessly. What are they doing
> that we aren't?
>
>   
Debian's repositories are solid because of the way they deal with 
packages in their various repositories. But if Ubuntu were to take the 
Debian way of doing things...Ubuntu would be 'out-dated' like Debian. I 
only moved over from Centos 5 because Ubuntu Hardy promised LTS and also 
had the toolchains I wanted (kvm) that Centos 5 did not have. At the 
moment, I do not need to manage dozens of machines so I will continue to 
use Ubuntu Hardy/Intrepid. I have not had much problems aside from 
trying to automate things (mostly installation which I have not yet 
conquered), waiting for an update to libvirt0 and the final straw having 
Xgl mess me up due to power management issues on the multiseat setup. I 
will wait for the day I can clear Windows off the desktops.