the short answer is "maybe yes, maybe no". read on if you want the long answer :-)
On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, Kirstin S. Reese wrote: > Is it worthwhile to upgrade to hamm now, or should I wait till it is > released? that depends entirely on how well you deal with dselect/dpkg problems. on the whole, "hamm" is stable enough to use. however, the archive site is changing on a daily basis as new packages get uploaded, so there is no guarantee that an install/upgrade which worked yesterday will work today (but it might work again tomorrow). this probably wont result in a broken system, but unless you have enough experience with debian in general and dselect & dpkg in particular to deal with weird packaging problems without panicing then you shouldn't upgrade. e.g. i built a bo system yesterday and immediately upgraded it to hamm. after running my autoup.sh script (to do the libc5 to libc6 upgrade), i ran dselect to upgrade everything else. cron failed to install & configure because of changes made to dpkg (--force-overwrite has been disabled for a few weeks to help us find and destroy some minor packaging bugs). because cron failed to install, several other packages failed to install...which caused several more to fail. if i had less experience with debian, i might have just given up after seeing hundreds and hundreds of error messages scroll past. fortunately, i've seen stuff like this many times before...the solution ended up being simple (it usually - but not always - is). install cron manually with dpkg --force-overwrite, run "dpkg --configure --pending", install a few other packages manually with dpkg, run "dpkg --configure --pending" again, and then return to dselect to finish the upgrade. so, the answer to your question is: if you can cope with a situation like that then go ahead and upgrade now...there'll be some hard work involved but it will be worth the effort. if you can't cope with this then wait for hamm to be released. > It would be very useful to have the latest netscape package, and the > latest xemacs package, but I don't need a broken system. Should I just > continue to bid my time? hamm isn't broken, but lack of experience or failure to follow the instructions (in the libc5 to libc6 howto, and in my script) carefully can result in a broken system. i think that hamm is very usable now. it is a huge improvement over bo. the bugfixes, upgrades and new packages certainly make upgrading a worthwhile thing to do. however the process of getting is possibly too difficult for many people at this moment in time. set aside at least half a day or a day to do the upgrade if you've never done it before. i get through it in a few hours now (most of which is waiting for dselect to do it's thing) but i've upgraded a couple of dozen boxes from bo to hamm by now, and have been using debian for a few years. > When is debian 2.0 due? "when it's ready" :-) craig -- craig sanders -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
