[Wolves] Question 1st, Rant 2nd

[Adam Sweet]

--- Kevanf1 <kevanf1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Going very slightly off kilter on this one... Would
> it be fair to say
> that a complete re-install of a new version of the
> same distro is
> better?  That is, better than upgrading?  SuSE
> always seems to have
> problems if you upgrade rather than re-install and
> now, apparently, in
> some small way so does Ubuntu.

To be honest, my problems were trivial, but I think
every upgrade has it's wrinkles. For me, the upgrades
left old packages installed due to the way newer
packages were named. The MP3 libgstreamer0.8-mad vs
libgstreamer-0.10-plugins-ugly is a clear case of
upstream development changes by the GStreamer team. By
default Ubuntu does not ship MP3 support due to iffy
licensing so I didn't get
libgstreamer-0.10-plugins-ugly and no MP3 support. 0.8
was left behind because it had no upgrade path due to
there not being a libgstreamer0.10-mad.

> A good argument for keeping a separate home
> partition then perhaps?
> Which is not something I have done but am seriously
> thinking of doing
> now.

I think for these reasons a fresh install is cleaner.
I keep /home on a a separate disk altogether in a bid
for slightly better performance and not losing
everything if one disk or t'other goes down, but
having it on a different partition is a good idea for
the reasosns you stated.

It just depends on whether you want ot hose your /etc
directory which must always be on the root /partition
by reinstalling and lose the system wide configuration
you've tinkered lovingly with for aeons versus having
an upgrade. Personally I think upgrades are fine, but
a clean install is good every couple of releases as it
cleans out the crap I collect.

> I know that there are major issues with having a
> separate home
> partition if you are trying a completely different
> distro due to UID
> allocations - some start at 500 while others start
> at 1000.

Red Hat basesd distros start at 500 for regular user
accounts and Debian based ones start at 1000. A
recursive chown would do this for you before your
regular user logged in but could be messy for your
user specific application configurations depending on
the application versions between distros. I've never
tried it to be honest. At worst it would puke on your
shoes and not work. Difficult on Ubuntu with the root
user being disabled unless you have a specific user
with sudo privs just for doing this.

Over and out.

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