Maciej Pilichowski wrote:
I can speak only for myself of course -- but after 10.2->10.3 I am afraid of upgrading again like I did before. I need another computer to do it, test and see it for myself, and then decide. And I don't work for NASA or anything like that, just desktop system. (Survey could be here handy -- if users are new/upgrade and if they are happy and about what, and if they are unhappy and about what).
You can say I am complaining (but I hope I am not), but even if -- it is the _fact_ that upgrades takes more and more time to fix things, while upgrade should be transparent.
I've seen quite a few posts on our forum complaining about failed upgrades, even dating as far back as 9.3 -> 10.0. I myself have also experienced upgrade failures where my newly installed system would not boot or give me a graphical interface. I have adopted the policy of keeping my /home partition separate from my root partition, then simply formatting the root partition and installing the new version freshly over it. It's worked out well (and I noticed that 10.3 by default wants to split / and /home into two partitions!). A few of our contributing members have noticed this trend as well, as mentioned in this thread: http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?s=eba227af1c7e10765fc84747c7e13943&showtopic=41347&view=findpost&p=209935 While I do love my OpenSUSE, perhaps its upgrade system could use a closer look during the planning/preparing stages of 11.0.
With incremental upgrade you don't have element of surprise ("wow, what a cool system, million bugs fixed") but on the other hand you don't have element of disappointment ("gee, nothing works") -- but is good for system reliability, you introduce fewer new features, you wait for responses, fix bugs, again introduce new features, and so on. It is easier to track those, maintain project, etc.
I don't like the idea of an incremental upgrade on OpenSUSE, mostly because of the lack of publicity it generates. The only things you hear about Gentoo these days in the news channels are complaints about it or its developers (fighting again this week, I see), and not what they're fixing or creating for the next release. With a set release schedule you keep a flow of positive news going out on a fairly regular basis. Besides, I think the opensuse-updater program in 10.3 has been working wonderfully. The bugs I've run into on my 10.3 installation have already been pushed out via opensuse-updater, and all the security exploits I've read about recently have been patched already. Assuming this large trend continues (lots of patches between releases), it's almost as good as the incremental update but we get to keep the publicity angle. ~~ Andrew D. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org