Upgrading to Ubuntu 20, *how* to back up?

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 08:00:18PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> Later, with more staff, we _did_ de-brand Ubuntu as requested, but
> this led me to an interesting discovery. The graphical tool for
> configuring apt repos, searching for the fastest mirror, adding
> proprietary drivers etc. is Ubuntu-branded right in the code. We'd
> have to rewrite and recompile it.
> 
> But Debian had not done so, so at that time (circa 2012-2013), if you
> installed Debian with GNOME 2 & went into that function, and went to
> the help/about page, you got a big Ubuntu logo and an inaccurate
> message about an Ubuntu version.
> 
> This amused me, but it did demonstrate that stuff was getting upstream
> effectively!

Yes, branding is always more difficult than it looks, especially when
you're trying to preserve translations as far as possible, as we (at
least initially) tried very hard to do in Ubuntu; if you have a
significant body of complete or nearly-complete translations then you
want to avoid going back to the translators unnecessarily.

As a result of rebranding the Debian installer for Ubuntu, I developed a
particularly niche bit of expertise: taking translated text strings in a
variety of languages that mentioned "Debian" and working out how to make
them talk about "Ubuntu" instead.  Monoglot Anglophones sometimes don't
immediately see the problem and think that a quick search-and-replace
should do the job, but if you consider the difference between "a Debian
image" and "an Ubuntu image" it should become clear enough.  Lots of
languages decline proper nouns in various ways: in Finnish the
possessive form "Debianin" becomes "Ubuntun".  Then you have languages
that transliterate proper nouns into different scripts: Korean has
"데비안" for Debian and "우분투" for Ubuntu (with multiple case forms
for each), while Hebrew has "דביאן" for Debian and "אובונטו" for Ubuntu.
Doing the substitution in a language you speak is one thing; doing it
for several dozen languages in bulk when you're only familiar with a few
of them is quite another.

I'm a bit of a languages nerd anyway, but this wasn't something I
anticipated needing to know about in early 2004!

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]