Upgrading to 7.0 - stupid requirements

[Scott Robbins]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 03:46:52PM -0400, Kevin K wrote:
> > That said: I do understand what you're saying, and yes, I can see why
> > you would want that.  It does make sense, and it's reasonable.  It's
> > just hard to achieve.  I don't think other mainstream OSes (e.g. Linux)
> > offer this ability either, though.  Am I wrong?
> 
> Redhat's up2date/yum ? I'm not 100% certain though.

RedHat, some Debian versions and others aimed at the server market will
have their precompiled binaries with reasonably sane defaults.  (Or else
with everything, including the kitchen sink, thrown in.)

The downside is that the server based ones, (RH, CentOS, etc.,) are
going to have older versions of packages.  This makes sense of course.
Much of the time, they'll simply concentrate on security updates and
have a 5 year EOL (possibly longer, possibly shorter, but around that.)

Desktop---well, things like Ubuntu and Fedora usually have major
upgrades every 6 months or so.  Fedora at least, recommends doing a
complete reinstall, though usually, updating via their yum package
manager will work.  It doesn't always. 

Arch Linux and some others have a rolling release type thing, where
incremental upgrades take place all the time, usually without major
effect.  They're smaller, and like the BSDs tend to be better at letting
people know--(things similar to our HEADSUP type posts.)  Fedora in
contrast, might make a decision that will break sound for 30 percent of
the users and the only way to find out will be to dig through their
(rather slow) bugzilla, only to find that the developer doesn't consider
it a bug.  (That's not an insult aimed at the developer--they have their
reasons which are often quite logical, but anyway...)


-- 
Scott Robbins
PGP keyID EB3467D6
( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6

Xander: She must be right. We must have some kind of
amnesia.
Buffy: I don't know what that is, but I'm certain I don't have it. I
bathe quite
often.