Re: [Evolution] stability/Reid

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist us>]

On Fri, 2009-10-09 at 11:12 -0700, bg wrote:
> > what specs does your box have?
>
> Athlon 2.6 with 1Gb RAM, 160Gb RAID Level 1 array.
>
> I've been experimenting with Ubuntu 8.10 on another machine.
> One of the things that both looks attractive about Ubuntu,
> and also generates a bit of apprehension, is the automatic
> "hands-off" updating. I'm not yet convinced that's really
> a good idea. What with dependencies and libraries and all
> the other potentially mismatched areas when changing software
> versions, I have some difficulty believing that it's even
> possible to reliably automate that process. But I could be wrong.

Heh!  Spoken like someone who's been stuck with a really old RPM-based
distro for a long time :-).  This kind of problem is mostly ancient
history.

Debian had solved this problem completely a long time ago: I couldn't
believe it either when I first switched from Red Hat 6.2 (RPM hell!!) to
Debian... and it Just Worked!  I never reinstalled Debian once in all
the years I was using it: I upgraded it using apt-get exclusively.  I
was even using the Debian "testing" (and some "unstable") distribution
there for a year or two before I switched to Ubuntu, with no issues.

Ubuntu inherited that stability of package management: I moved my home
system from Debian to Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) and since then I've
upgraded to every release (currently up to 8.04 as I mentioned before)
using standard upgrades: no reinstalls.  I've also been applying
security upgrades almost daily, every day, since then.

Although I can't say for sure nothing's ever broken, I CAN say I don't
_remember_ anything ever breaking--so if it did it was (a) a long time
ago, (b) not very painful, and (c) quickly fixed.


My understanding is that the RPM based distros like newer Fedoras have
also figured out how to get this kind of stability, for the most part; I
don't use them so I can't say.


Anyway, FYI nothing happens _automatically_; what happens is when there
are packages available for upgrade you get an icon in your notification
area[*] which you can select to open the update manager.  You can then
choose whether to install the new packages, or not, or even install only
some of them.  The package manager won't let you install an inconsistent
set of packages.


-----
[*] Starting with Ubuntu 9.04 you don't get the notification icon by
default; instead your update manager opens itself.  It checks daily for
security updates and weekly for non-security-related updates.
Personally I really don't like this--for one thing the damn update
manager always pops itself BEHIND all my other windows so I never see
it) so I reconfigured it to work the old way.