[OpenIndiana-discuss] I figured this deserved a separate thread

[Gary Driggs]

On Nov 4, 2010, at 4:41 PM, "Kevin J. Woolley" wrote:
> CentOS and other enterprise-grade Linuxes also upgrade well among minor releases, but need to be re-installed to go to the next major release.  Those release cycles are suitably long that I'd argue the net effect is negligible.

I have one each of RHEL & CentOS that were dist upgraded from v3 to 4 without issue.

> Fedora, most Ubuntu (minus LTS), and many other Linux distros have much shorter release cycles and don't make any claims that they upgrade well among actual releases (as opposed to repo updates, etc.).

You have twice suggested that Fedora is a production OS when it is not -- it's equivalent to a BSD current, testing or unstable Debian, or Solaris Express. That is, it's where new features are added & tested before moving in to the "enterprise" distribution regardless of whether it's on a desktop or server.

> For what it's worth I don't believe I've ever upgraded a Solaris box across major versions, so I don't have any direct experience there.

I haven't tried it since Solaris 2.6-8 -- and then only on a personal workstation but at the time it was one of only a handful of operating systems that had a solid track record for being able to do so without issue 99% of the time or better. OS X can't yet match that across major versions but they seem to be making an effort to match the reputation that Solaris had (still has?) in this area.

I'd be curious to learn how many admins feel this is an important feature since my server OS upgrade cycles tend to coincide with hardware upgrades & in that case it's more work to try to preserve an exact replica of the old system it's replacing  -- except, perhaps, in the case of a physical to virtual conversion.

Again, workstations or lab/dev/QA systems are another matter depending on their level of importance (e.g. my production workstation lately lags behind by a year or two but my notebook gets a quarterly facelift at a minimum).

-Gary