Non destructive install is important.

[Michael R. Head]

On Fri, 2006-09-01 at 19:43 +0100, Aigars Mahinovs wrote:
> On 9/1/06, Michael R. Head <burner at suppressingfire.org> wrote:
> > > However for the first-time user of linux this is perplexing and it
> > > should be as easy as version 6.06.
> >
> > How does this request make sense unless you already have an existing
> > linux partition? This is not meant as an adversarial question, but an
> > actual point of confusion for me.
> 
> A user that installed Ubuntu previosely and now needs to either
> upgrade or reinstall would fall into this problem. 

While I somewhat agree, Ubuntu supports and encourages in place upgrades
(as does Debian), and there are other ways to rescue a wonky install
rather than reinstallation.

For more complicated uses, the alternative install CD does support
reusing a partition without formatting it (again, I don't know if this
is possible or not on the default desktop install).

> Later at this point some recovery tools could hook in to really try
> and restore the system that was installed there - restore the users
> and their home directories, mounted filesystems, installed packages,
> configuration of such packages, ...

Such a system would be nice, I agree, but I can also see it being quite
a headache to implement (was the installed system Suse, Redhat, Debian,
Ubuntu, linux-from-scratch?). What versions of software were there? Do
config files needs to be transformed to suit the current versions?

Put another way, wouldn't good in-place upgrade and recovery tools and
excellent backup tools be better?

> --
> Best regards,
>     Aigars Mahinovs        mailto:aigarius at debian.org
>  #--------------------------------------------------------------#
>  |     .''`.         Debian GNU/Linux              LAKA         |
>  |    : :' :      http://www.debian.org  &  http://www.laka.lv  |
>  |    `. `'                                                     |
>  |      `-                                                      |
>  #--------------------------------------------------------------#
> 
-- 
Michael R. Head <burner at suppressingfire.org>
suppressingfire.org
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