Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 06:38:45 +1000 From: Greg Black <gjb@comkey.com.au> To: "Brian D. Woodruff" <wood@eris.quintessential.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 3.1 UNstable Message-ID: <19990331203845.7636.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au> In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.19990330142132.009573e0@freeq.com> of Tue, 30 Mar 1999 14:21:32 CST References: <3.0.6.32.19990328111310.008b1840@freeq.com> <3.0.6.32.19990327211654.008b91f0@freeq.com> <3.0.6.32.19990328111310.008b1840@freeq.com> <3.0.6.32.19990330142132.009573e0@freeq.com>
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> Every version of FreeBSD I've ever used comes with a program called > /stand/sysinstall which has an option called "upgrade". And every OS in the world has an upgrade option, and all them fail under various sets of circumstances. This is why they mostly have warnings about the possibilities of failure and the steps you should take before you use them. I don't know what FreeBSD offers in the way of such warnings, since I never read that stuff, but they ought to be there (and if they're not, then that's what needs most to be fixed). It's my opinion, after years of playing with these things, that using the upgrade option is always the worst way to upgrade and that the path to long term sanity is via fresh installations. Think about it for a moment. How many ways can a system administrator modify a system from some vanilla state? How many new states are possible? It's not infinite, but for practical purposes it might as well be. Therefore, the people designing the upgrade path have an impossible task because they simply cannot even imagine all the ways the system being upgraded might be different from what they expect. For a fresh install, they have a clean base and they have a chance of getting it right (modulo the almost infinite variety of PC hardware combinations that face those who build systems for that platform). -- Greg Black <gjb@acm.org> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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