On 07/01/11 07:56, Nirbheek Chauhan wrote: > On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >> William Hubbs wrote: >> As a user, if a person hasn't upgraded in about 6 months, they may as well >> reinstall anyway. That is usually the advice given on -user. After a year >> without updating, it is certainly easier and most likely faster to >> reinstall. > > Except for the fact that while you upgrade, you still have a usable > system. Reinstallation means a massive time-sink during which your > machine is completely unusable. This is not an option for a lot of > people.
I'd call myself an "affected user" in this context: As (lazy) administrator of some servers (hardened) and desktops (stable), both virtualbox servers and guests, as well as an x86 binhost vm for the laptop, and the only requirement of keep-it-working, I'm doing the upgrades somewhat seldom: up to 1.5 years, especially for the hardened servers. As I don't care for compilation time (the servers are up 24/7), my thought to still allow for a somewhat stable upgrade path: Regularly (twice a year?) take a tree snapshot to keep around (infra? releng?), and provide some mechanism (eselect?) to pick such an old snapshot instead of the current (rsync) one. Then, run each (half-year) update within a couple of days... Maybe the tree snapshots are there already within the live-cds: Do we aim to provide an upgrade path from one live-cd snapshot to the next one? /haubi/ -- Michael Haubenwallner Gentoo on a different level
