9.10 is a black eye for Ubuntu

[Kent Borg]

Ray Leventhal wrote:
> My experience has been wonderful.

I have played with the RC inside Virtualbox on a Mac, regular fresh
install from the regular disc, and in my short
experience it has worked.

I have not installed 9.10 on my primary computer and when I do I will
not be doing an upgrade: My current Ubuntu is 9.04 but I installed from
the Alternate CD doing whole disk encryption.  Upgrading that seems iffy
to me.  I would surprised if everything worked correctly.

Upgrades are very difficult things to engineer.  The number of different
working starting states can be so gigantic and surprising--and that
isn't counting the starting states that are actually broken and the user
hasn't noticed yet. 

Think if it from the perspective of a precise speccing of software:
because of all the variations that the upgrade can encounter, the
problem that an upgrade is intended to solve is poorly defined.  Maybe
upgrades should survey what they find and refuse to touch a machine that
is in an unexpected state...but does that mean if I edit some /etc
config file my computer will no longer upgrade?  That seems extreme.  On
the other hand, if I have changed basic stuff, the upgrade might be
impossible.

Heck, if I merely keep my home directory, there are lots of ways to
break me as a specific user--though creating a different user and
logging on as that user should produce a working case.


-kb