Non destructive install is important.

Aurélien Naldi aurelien.naldi at gmail.com
Mon Sep 11 11:57:06 BST 2006


Hi,

Just my thoughts on this problem: I also don't think that installing
without reformating is a good idea because of remaining files from the
previous install (init scripts, cron jobs... would for example be
launched). This would also decrease the security of the "new" install
(old binaries not known by the package manager and thus not fixed by
security updates).

The "right" approach is to have a separate partition for /home and
store here everything you want to keep, then you can reformat your :
partition and still keep relevant data. I think that since breezy the
automatic partition at install time uses LVM to offer a separate /home
(I have not checked this, using a RAID system).
If /home is not a separate partition, an alternative might be to
reinstall without reformatting but delete all files outside of the
/home directory, this would be helpfull in some edge cases but would
avoid keeping dangerous files everywhere and getting something worse
than a dist-upgraded system.

On a side note, the mac OSX installer has a nice feature to help users
upgrade from an older computer: plug the old computer in the new one
during install, it will appear as an external harddrive, the installer
will then copy all user's data and settings from the old install to
the new one. This fills another  (related) use case. Unfortunatly it
can not be done as easily with PC.

On 9/11/06, Klaus Bitto <klaus.bitto at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > If you want to upgrade an existing installation, then you should use the
> > normal package management tools to do so, not the installer.
>
> My "dist-upgrade" went terribly wrong, even though I knew I had to run it
> many times, as well as the "-f install", which i regard as wrong in itself
> already.
>
> Rather than telling one should upgrade using the package management, while
> there is no tool everyone can use to do so, I'd have the installer force
> people to have separated partitions for data (/home and maybe /etc) and
> system, or do so by itself, if auto partitioning is chosen by the user, and
> then make the distribution so that you can only upgrade by installing a new
> system, which automatically adds the existing home and comfiguration
> folders.



-- 
aurelien naldi



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