Dapper is LESS stable than Breezy.

[Matthew Davidson]

Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Part of the point of using Debian/Ubuntu is that you can upgrade and the 
> upgrade is supposed to work well. I don't see how upgrading could make 
> Thunderbird and Gnome less stable in a way that doesn't apply to a clean 
> install.

And yet it does. Thanks for reassuring me that it's not just me. I've 
been reluctant to point the finger, because I always upgrade a month (in 
this case closer to two months) before the official release, and have 
blamed any upgrade hassles on my lack of patience.

Mind you, I wait until release to upgrade my wife's computer, and with 
every upgrade her system (particularly Evolution) has been provoking 
louder, more frequent, and more startlingly creative use of obscenities.

"Do a fresh install", "create a new user", and "delete ~/.g*" are not 
satisfactory answers to this problem. Particularly in the case of 
"enterprise" upgrades to the next LTS release, I don't think having 
every user in a large organisation suddenly losing their desktop 
preferences (or for that matter their bookmarks, address books, mail, 
etc.) one morning is acceptable.

The first time I ever installed GNU/Linux it was Debian 2.0, and that 
system was upgraded to 2.1, 2.2, and 3.0, before being reluctantly put 
out to pasture, without ever seeing another install CD, and without any 
major problems I couldn't trace back to myself (disclaimer: rose-tinted 
hindsight may apply).

Reinstalling from scratch on a regular basis is what I used to do with 
Windows. It's not good enough. Upgrade issues _are_ bugs.

Matthew.

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