#1 2018-05-03 10:44:58

cloverskull

Member

Registered: 2015-10-01

Posts: 348

Hypothetical idea - userspace upgrade/migration script?

Hey guys,

Excellent work on the new release. I'm excited to give it a shot this weekend.

The one thing that is a bit strange with debian stable is the fact that it _isn't_ a rolling release model, and upgrades usually involve manually maintaining important files and information while completely blowing away your OS and installing the latest release. This is fun and cathartic and something I typically enjoy, but people inevitably ask about upgrades and the feedback is usually that userspace stuff won't change without significant manual intervention.

Here's an idea - how hard would it be to write some sort of script which can iterate through each userspace change between versions and ask the user, following an upgrade/dist-upgrade, to update each? Ostensibly it'd be copying things from /etc/skel or something along those lines, but each file or setting could be confirmed by the user. Think of it like a dist-upgrade when there's some kind of configuration conflict and apt gives you the option to use what's on disk, what the package maintainer wrote, and other options to diff the configs or open up a text editor.

Thoughts here? What would be the engineering lift for something like this? It _should_ be straightforward enough to build an initial framework to take care of this, no?

tknomanzr

BL Die Hard

From: Around the Bend

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 1,057

Re: Hypothetical idea - userspace upgrade/migration script?

You mean like this?

bl-user-setup --refresh

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DeepDayze

Like sands through an hourglass...

From: In Linux Land

Registered: 2017-05-28

Posts: 1,901

Re: Hypothetical idea - userspace upgrade/migration script?

Sounds like what happens when a config file in /etc gets changed on a package upgrade and you get promoted whether you want to use the developer's file, keep existing or to see the difference between them. Something like that should be useful for user config files as well despite user files not being touched on package upgrades.

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Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 9,093

Website

Re: Hypothetical idea - userspace upgrade/migration script?

The one thing that is a bit strange with debian stable is the fact that it _isn't_ a rolling release model, and upgrades usually involve manually maintaining important files and information while completely blowing away your OS and installing the latest release.

I transitioned the family laptop from jessie to stretch just fine, there were no problems whatsoever and it rebooted into a functional desktop and I had *lots* of added foreign repositories in that system.

I also tested the jessie → stretch change in BunsenLabs systems a few times and they all went through cleanly.

And transition problem threads are pretty rare over at forums.debian.net despite the fact that Debian do actually recommend an upgrade rather than a reinstall.

Did you follow the guides supplied by Debian when attempting your upgrades in the past?

They are very detailed:

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ … ng.en.html

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