[ubuntu-us-ma] Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 Upgrade script extremely inefficient (downloads from the internet, ignores local CD image)

[Jordan Mantha]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.us> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-10-30 at 09:38 -0400, leftyfb wrote:
>> Regardless, I highly suggest backing up /home and creating a list of
>> installed packages 'sudo dpkg --get-selections >
>> packagesinstalled.txt'
>> and then installing 9.10 from scratch.
>
> Sorry, but I can't agree.  I never upgrade from scratch.  I started with
> Ubuntu 5.10 and I've done in-place upgrades to every single release
> (except the last one: I bought a new system a week ago and installed
> Karmic beta from scratch).  Before that I used Debian and always did
> upgrades there, too.  This is both on my system at home AND my systems
> at work.  It's always worked absolutely fine.

It can depend on what you're after. For instance, some things you miss
out on if you just do in-place upgrades. Like in Karmic you won't get
Grub2 automatically unless you do a fresh install. In Jaunty you
wouldn't get ext4 partitions. On the other hand in-place upgrade is a
great way to go if you've got a lot of customizations.

I do a lot of fresh installs (I reinstall about every 2 months)
because I'm a developer and I try to do a fair amount of dogfooding
but I know a "senior" Ubuntu developer who has a machine that he has
not reinstalled since Red Hat 6, including moving from Red Hat to
Debian to Ubuntu!

-Jordan