On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 2:34 AM, Brian May <br...@linuxpenguins.xyz> wrote: > On 2017-04-27 16:19, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote: >> >> It seems you've missed the point (which was about 4 years between RHEL >> releases). > > There was almost three years between Woody (July 19th 2002) and Sarge (June > 6th 2005), yet we still allowed upgrades from Woody to Sarge. > > The time duration is irrelevant. It is the policy we have that we support > and test upgrades that matters. It is much easier to ignore upgrades and > recommend to reinstall from scratch, that means we don't need to test and > debug why upgrades break under various corner cases. Not so good for our > users however.
Did Linux development move as quickly as it does now? Did users experience more problems or failures when running those dist-upgrades? Of course duration matters. It's not the same use-case as a Debian dist-upgrade but feel free to look up gentoo-user@ threads where a user kicks them off with "I haven't upgraded for 6 months, 1 year, 3 years." The longer the period, the more problems. Simply because Debian supports dist-upgrades doesn't make them easy or doesn't make the duration between them irrelevant. We're on a more or less two-year cycle and it makes dist-upgrades easier that if we were on a 4-year cycle; I don't see what can possibly be debatable about this.
