upgrading LTS to LTS

[Ric Moore]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 20:35 +0100, Colin Law wrote:
> On 12 October 2010 14:44, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
> > On 12 October 2010 13:54, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >> On 12 October 2010 12:22, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
> >>> In theory, yes.
> >>
> >> A slightly ambiguous answer there I think.
> >
> > Deliberately so. There is no way to know now, 18 months before the
> > next LTS releases, whether it will be _possible_ to upgrade from LTS
> > to LTS. Hence 'in theory'.
> 
> That is not what I meant, so obviously my reply was also ambiguous,
> sorry  :(  The original question was 'will I be able to upgrade from
> LTS to LTS or will I need to upgrade all the intermediate releases'
> to which you answered Yes (more or less).  I thought it was not clear
> whether you meant yes you will be able to upgrade from LTS to LTS or
> yes you will need to go through the intermediate releases.
> 
> I was not having a dig, just trying to make sure the answer was clear,
> at which I failed miserably.

Heh, reading the "other" thread where a user can't seem to update from
10.4 to 10.10 because of non-standard repo issues in the packages, to me
it would be a stretch for the devels to write all of the "what-if??"
scripts to check for every tiny thing one does to one's system to make
it do what you want it to, and make the leap past 4 releases
successfully. 

The poor guys are over worked, under-paid, and to me it's impossible for
every contingency to be planned for. In theory, if you have a pristine
install of 8.04 you can upgrade to 10.4. I just wouldn't trust it,
myself, if only as a kindness to the developers.

So, when I do my clean install of 10.10, if something blows at least
I'll pretty much know that I have a valid issue to report for
consideration. Not some BS issue on my end. Ric


-- 
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
Linux user# 44256