On 2015-05-11 18:40, jd1008 wrote:
On 05/11/2015 12:45 AM, M. Fioretti wrote:
Why not backup everything,
then completely ERASE the old installation, installing over it
the current version from SCRATCH, then configure it to work as you
need?
Seriously. Wouldn't it be a much more reliable path, and consume much
less
time in the end?
....
Well, for one thing, installing from scratch requires possibly a large
number of config files, which would require remembering which ones
they are, search for them in the backup and overwrite the newly
installed
config files, or worse: merge them into the new config files, or go
through
a painful edit to see what setting from the old make sense in the new,
since not all settings in the old would make sense in the new.
I DO know and confirm that things are exactly like that, because,
as somebody else in this thread put it:
It's not the upgrading process that's the problem. It's that the newer
software tends to be broken in anything but the default configuration.
My point is simply that all this "remembering which old configuration
files
should be reused, or painfully edited to merge them into the new ones"
etc..
still is, in many real world cases, much less painful, frustrating, time
consuming...
than forcing an obsolete system to morph into something else, all by
yourself, with nobody, from mailing lists to online tutorials, able
to help you. You get MUCH, MUCH more help and answers to questions like:
1) "I just installed the CURRENT version of this software. It doesn't do
X,
how can I configure it for that task too?"
than to questions like
2) "I have this 5-year old sw, with a config file in a format long
abandoned,
how do I make it run just as it is, but in a totally new environment?"
because, if nothing else, when you ask type-1 questions there are way
more
people online with the same questions, and the related answers, in the
same
moment, than with type-2 questions.
That's why, in my experience, reinstalling from scratch, then "painfully
editing"
ends up being quicker, more reliable and MUCH less painful than
upgrades. At
least with upgrades that are NOT to the immediately next version.
Marco
--
http://mfioretti.com
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