Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Mark Carroll Newsgroups: alt.os.linux.debian,comp.os.linux.setup Subject: Re: Anything I should worry about before upgrading my Debian oldstable (Wheezy) to stable (Jessie)? Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2015 10:22:49 +0000 Organization: none Lines: 52 Message-ID: <87oadlju6e.fsf@ixod.org> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="1b3e5cba9e4d07a53741e6f3d1717925"; logging-data="29260"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19slHwxW9/08/8UHqYzb1Gr" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:KDIrEHySFoeRNRABE8P2hI0cKPs= sha1:cZoO+lxqtHHHxtzFsHL1TLhYuJo= Xref: csiph.com alt.os.linux.debian:7498 comp.os.linux.setup:3893 On 20 Dec 2015, Ant wrote: > Oops. I messed up in my body text. I meant to say "With my almost 1.5 > weeks Christmas 2015 break coming up, I think it is time to finally > upgrade (not a clean install?) my old Debian oldstable (Wheezy) to > stable (Jessie) ..." I am already at oldstable/Wheezy. That doesn't sound too bad then. You seem to have a good amount of disk space available, just read through the release notes carefully, there are passages about things like purging removed packages to get rid of old init scripts. It's not difficult, it's just good to know about it all. My wheezy to jessie upgrades have gone generally quite well. >> And you do not have to use full systemd on Jessie, but stay with >> SysVInit as provided by systemd-sysv (which is what I am using >> on two Jessie systems -- Debian 8.2). > > Oh. I thought Debian stable was forcing everyone off SysVInit to SystemD > like other Linux OSes. :/ In the longer term, who knows how viable avoiding SystemD will be? Other software seems to be increasingly assuming that it is now the way to offer various functionality, just like we started having to use apulse because applications began to assume pulseaudio. In jessie, a SysVInit-based system remains quite workable. Though, I'm not using GNOME anywhere, I don't know how it is from there: remember that SystemD is more than just an init system: a lot depends on if you just don't want to use it for starting daemons, or if you really want as little trace of it on your system as possible. There might be small issues in some desktop environments, in things like automounting flash drives for users or offering a working power-down button to them, but I haven't run into anything too major, it's just the kind of stuff you should test out to see if it still works. In my limited experience, many of the issues seem solvable simply by installing the right non-obvious package. It's all a bit too much of a confusing twisty maze for me to figure out why some things stopped working -- the whole ecosystem with cgmanager and polkit and whatnot in there is frankly a bit opaque to me, even given the logging -- but a non-SystemD jessie system is certainly viable if you don't mind doing things the old, manual way while you figure some new things out. My main outstanding puzzle is actually on a SystemD system so I can't blame its absence! I don't know how much momentum/activity Devuan has but I still don't think it's anywhere near ready for prime-time. I'd say, read the release notes, take a full backup, then go ahead, do the upgrade, reboot, and test jessie out right away. If something does stop working and you can't figure it out (which is unlikely given that probably others ran into it by now and you can google their solutions) you can always restore from backup, but you'll probably be able to get it working well enough if you don't mind having at least some systemd-related libraries around. -- Mark