Hi list, while still on debian buster (old-old-stable soon), i am approaching the point, where i will be ready to upgrade. I do have backup(s) from different points in time, and can carry out restore to a VM, that is almost identical to my main system, that i can use as a playground for playing through the whole process. Also i can automatically set up a running duplicate of my system on bare metal in another partition, in order to allow investigation of the process without risking my current working environment.
But i could not yet decide upon the right way to progress, 3 alternatives coming to mind: 1. Upgrade from current configuration using upgrade path tools (apt) and plan only one step (going to bullseye) at a time, eventually having to upgrade a second time later. 2. Install a fresh bullseye and try to manually make it as similar as can be to my current workhorse 3. Skip bullseye altogether and jump to bookworm right away. >From my past experiences, i recall one problem, that i am still suffering from: the file group and user owners, that reside on a different disk set (on a ZFS pool, to be more precise). In order to alleviate the problem, i did at one point fetch an older /etc/group and passwd file from a backup and created a mess. I'd love to straigthen this out now. At the time, i did investigate (configuration management) tools, but found the effort was much too high for my liking, as i am the only real user on my system and also retired, making such a professional solution going way too far. I can be patient, but i would like to find the most reasonable path to get a more up-to-date system soon. Would anyone with more experience, than i have, give me their point-of-view/recommendations as food-for-thought, please? Thank you in advance DdB
