Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic" Alpha4 and the Intel video drivers...

[Michael Butash]

It's actually a good point Ryan - if they'd just backport more newer
builds of software, it would obviate the need for massive upheaval which
inevitably breaks half the things it does.  The big-bang approach of
dist-upgrades between revisions just simply doesn't work as it's been
proven throughout time.  I understand backports become a problem to
maintain for someone like Canonical, but it would seem a necessity to
blur that line a bit further than they tend to, or simply have better
q/a on their major builds, especially once they actually dub them
releases.

My motivation to upgrade lately has been mostly centered around
networkmanager, pulseaudio, and alsa, which simply doesn't offer much in
the way of backports for any older revisions of Ubuntu.  I really
couldn't give a rat's ass to use the newest kernels most of the time,
unless it's new hardware, which means a new install anyways.  Some of
the periphery software however offers compelling features that I
consider a necessity and hence worth the effort of upgrade, just to get
some nugget feature that was lacking.  Then I end up with more broken
than fixed for that one little nugget.

Redhat really turned me off from ever compiling anything in linux, where
Slackware was my first love that let me compile just about anything
safely.  Ubuntu is somewhere in between, where I've fallen into
recursive dependency recompile hell, but has steadily gotten better to
roll my own.  This just typically borks any future package updates, that
I have to be pretty desperate to want to roll my own.  I compile a lot
of packages on my HTPC box to get VDPAU accelerated mplayer codes,
behaving pulseaudio/alsa, and somewhat stable Boxee/XBMC software, but
at that point I don't maintain regular updates at all, security be
damned.  Either this or I roll the dice on dist-upgrades, and take the
kick in the groin when I do.

-mb


On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 14:39 -0700, Ryan Rix wrote:
> Michael Butash wrote:
> > I guess I'm lame in assuming or expecting that if they're going to offer
> > an upgrade function, that it work.  Microsoft has punished people for 25
> > years thinking such heretical thoughts even trying to use their
> > *upgrades* between os's, but it's nice to dream that one day it might
> > just be reality with some os.  Ubuntu has been about as close as I've
> > found, though FreeBSD used to be really good about dist-upgrades too
> > when it was my choice in server os.
> > 
> > -mb
> 
> Here's a thought; Why do distros even need 'releases' at all? If a 
> constant update cycle was used, rather than one huge dist-upgrade, these 
> problems would hardly ever arise... And when they did, it would be with 
> one or two components, hopefully NOT mission critical, and could be 
> fixed with five minutes of hunting and updating an /etc config file. 
> installer ISOs could be generated weekly or so, or just be netinst images
> I guess Distrowatch would be out of business in that case.
> 
> Upgrades suck, I reinstall ;)
> 
> Ryan
> 
>