[mythtv-users] How to avoid upgrade headaches

Steve Peters - Priority Electronics steve at priorityelectronics.com
Wed Nov 11 17:08:06 UTC 2009


> I take the opposite approach. I upgrade as often as I reasonably can.
> The less frequent your upgrades the more likely you are to run into
> issues and the harder it is to track down because there were so many
> changes. The distro maintainers also spend most of their time insuring
> a clean update path from the last release. Once you get back further
> you are going further into untested waters. I upgrade my Ubuntu system
> usually a month or so after each release. My last two upgrades (8.10
> -> 9.04 -> 9.10) took about 45 minutes. I clicked OK a few times. And
> I was off without any problems. When I do have an issue it is usually
> just one problem and it is easier to track down because there weren't
> that many changes, and lots of others are doing the exact same thing
> as me. Along those lines, I update my system every week or so in
> between releases. Again that way I am making minimum amount of changes
> during a given update so it is easy know what caused a problem. And
> problems just don't happen that often when making small changes. Also
> when I do a distribution upgrade the changes usually aren't that
> dramatic between a fully updated system and the next release.
> _______________________________________________
>
>   
I hear what you're saying, but here is another example for you why i 
tend not to upgrade: I have an IBM R50 laptop running mythtv and 
mythbuntu 9.04. I upgraded to 9.10 and suddenly I can't play playstation 
games via pSX. Before I would just insert a playstation game cd, and 
play it through the emulator. Now i can't do that. Seems to be some sort 
of bug in the new version of xorg that is not compatible with my radeon 
mobility 7500.

These types of bugs seem to pop up on me all the time. Each linux system 
gets little things broken when i do updates/upgrades.

I still do my updates, but i'm cautious about which programs i'll run 
updates for. I'm not doing any more xorg updates for a while, that's for 
sure (except on that laptop that needs that bug fixed).

-Steve



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