Re: [Evolution] Moving from evolution to evolution

[MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz gmail com>]

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 5:19 AM, Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-07-01 at 12:00 +0100, Pete Biggs wrote:
> > It seems to me that all the people who have had problems with the
> > upgrade process recently have been Ubuntu users and I wonder if there is
> > something they've done in the packaging or configuration that is causing
> > problems.
>
> I'm still a little confused as to why so many users seem to feel the
> need to backup and restore their personal data just to upgrade their
> operating system in place.  Backing up of course is a prudent safety
> measure, but if the upgrade goes smoothly there should be no need to
> restore the backup.
For my part, I just backed it up (file system copy to another folder)
to ensure nothing got lost.  I had no need to restore that.

> Are there actually distro installers that don't allow you to upgrade
> without nuking your home directory, or do some installers not make that
> option clear enough, or am I just misunderstanding the problem?
With Ubuntu, upgrades are frequently problematic and re-installs work
better.  This is as documented by the Ubuntu folks.

> There does seem to be a large concentration of Ubuntu users reporting
> these kinds of problems, but that might just be a statistical anomaly
> rather than something Ubuntu is doing wrong.
I don't know if it's "wrong," but it is a pain.  I've been using
Ubuntu for almost two years solid now and upgrades are invariably
reported in the discussion lists as problematic.

However, before that I was using CentOS, and upgrades were also
discouraged there, for similar reasons.

I do maintain a separate /home from my root, and that has saved me a
lot of grief, but not always.  When I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my
laptop, then copied all my files over from my desktop, something broke
the system and I never figured out what - it was something in my
startup files that works on my desktop and doesn't on my laptop.  I
found a way around that, but it was painful for an hour or so.