Is "release-upgrade" back ?

[grady]

Friends:

My understanding is deplorably small. So I may be mistaken in some of what follows.
My memory's a bit weak, to boot.

IIRC, in the kanotix or sidux era, a decision was made to stop supporting what I'll call  "release-upgrade" (i.e. the installation of a newer release over an earlier one, but leaving partitions and their contents in place except for changes effected by the new release).
It was argued that maintaining "release-upgrade" was too energy-consuming for too little benefit (existing files/directories could easily be saved and reinstalled after the fresh install.
That's as I recall.

Several weeks ago, on a new machine, I installed (to hdd) Riders on the Storm. Partitions:
-primary (NTFS),
-logical (ext4): /, /home, and a linux archive
-logical swap,
-logical (fat32) windows archive

I think I did a dist-upgrade immediately. Only then did I install Win7 to the primary.
I then botched an attempt to get boot management back for grub.

I chose to do a re-install of Riders.
With very little tinkering from me, the re-install result appeared to be exactly what I had had ten minutes before (minus the dist-upgrade), except:
-a few files I had put in /home after the first install endured, and,
-grub was back in control.

From what I see, the "release-upgrade" function is back and working great. And I call that very good news for the less skilled. If I've missed finding a notice to that effect: mea culpa.

Comment, please?

grady

[michaa7]

...
Comment, please?

Only thing I can say is: What has happened as you describe it is exactly what should happen. I *assume* with "release-upgrade" you refere to something happening in Kanotix era where a release upgrade was a hacky image, but I don't remember whether or not the home partition could survive.
Anyways, the way I works today is the way it worked since sidux days.

[DeepDayze]

Would be nice to use a new ISO to update an existing install while leaving existing settings intact while upgrading the already-installed packages to new versions as on the ISO.

Yep,I believe Kanotix back in the old days (when it was based on Sid) had an option to do that but it did the update in a rather hacky way.

[michaa7]

@ DeepDayze
If you wish, you may do so: You only need to hide away your home partition by not mounting it or not pointing to it during install. OTAH I don't get the advantage over a d-u?

[piper]

I could see these forums flooded with problems with this idea, hacky way is trouble,  maybe within a week or so of installing and screwing something up and reinstalling, but months of a good install

I just can't see the logic

oh well, choice is good

my 2c

[DeepDayze]

@ DeepDayze
If you wish, you may do so: You only need to hide away your home partition by not mounting it or not pointing to it during install. OTAH I don't get the advantage over a d-u?

I'm not advocating this way but for some people du's can be difficult over a slow connection or that they have no network connection for a particular machine