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Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian

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On 28.11.2017 17:58, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2017-11-28 at 11:53, Patrick Bartek wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 28 Nov 2017 10:28:57 -0500 The Wanderer
>> <wanderer@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>
>>> I've run across someone who says her machine is running Debian
>>> oldoldoldstable or maybe even oldoldoldoldstable, and who
>>> consequently can't upgrade to newer Debian.
>>>
>>> I seem to recall that there *is* a way to do step-wise upgrades of
>>> such old systems, i.e. upgrading from oldoldoldoldstable to
>>> oldoldoldstable, then to oldoldstable, then to oldstable, then to
>>> stable. However, I'm stumped as to how to actually get started on
>>> doing that.
>>>
>>> The last few steps of this are straightforward; oldoldstable is
>>> still available in the repos, as far as I'm aware. The first ones
>>> are more of a problem; if I understand matters correctly, anything
>>> prior to oldoldstable is removed from the live repos, although its
>>> .deb files are still maintained on e.g. snapshot.debian.org. (Which
>>> doesn't really suffice for the equivalent of a dist-upgrade,
>>> because you'd have to manually download all the correct .debs by
>>> hand and then install them with dpkg.)
>>>
>>> Is there in fact a way to manage the first steps of this stepwise
>>> upgrade, from one aged-out-of-the-repos release to another?
>>>
>>> If so, any pointers to information on how to go about it?
>>
>> Save yourself time and lots of problems, back up your data and do a
>> clean install of the current Debian release.
> 
> A: This isn't me, this is someone I encountered.
> 
> B: That's not always a viable option, depending on the circumstances.
> It's probably the easier option when it is viable, but that doesn't mean
> it should be the only option considered, for cases when something else
> may be more viable.
> 
>> To do what you want requires dist-upgrading each release, in order,
>> one-at-a-time, then troubleshooting each dist-upgrade once done with
>> no guarantees it will work.
> 
> Yes, of course. That's established procedure, and it's entirely
> reasonable to expect people to follow it. (Is there any reason it
> shouldn't work, when it worked for people at the time when those
> releases were made?)
> 
>> Be sure to read and explicitly follow the dist-upgrade instructions
>> in the Release Notes for each release. Many times there are special
>> things that must be done. Just dist-upgrading from your current old
>> install to Stretch, skipping all those inbetween is "not
>> recommended," meaning it won't work.
> 
> Of course. That's exactly why accessible repositories containing those
> older releases are needed; my question was about how / where to manage
> those, and that was answered in the first reply.
> 

As a friendly recommendation:
If it was about me, I would encourage to backup the home directories as 
well as mail or similar, depending what other kind of services running 
under the particular system.

Backup the data to an external usb drive or the whole source drive if 
you are keen on that, for example. Then do a "clean" install of a new 
system on the original drive. Otherwise you might run into issues, where 
you might miss out on an important package, if you snapshot upgrade one 
by one.

Running such a old and obsolete system is not only a security risk, but 
also in other areas where improvements has been made, you miss out on a 
lot. This was not the question of course, but it simply doesn't make 
much sense to keep such an old operating system around which is not even 
actively supported by documentation or people likewise anymore.

And it might not simply be worth the hassle to upgrade step by step, 
possible breaking something in the process and troubleshoot why one 
package depends on another or crippling other services, having obsolete 
folders or even configuration files and settings laying around, which 
are not needed anymore. As stated by other people here, it might and 
perhaps will, take much longer time to troubleshoot everything or simply 
end up to be impossible to do correctly.

Better clean and start from scratch install with a known supported 
installation.
Ensure just to backup mail(dirs), mail, .ssh, .config or similar folders 
in "home" (or better the whole home folders" or "var" or other locations 
which might contain data you need. Or "etc" for configuration settings - 
but "etc" content, might and will most likely have changed dramatically 
depending on what was installed previously.

To backup the software list of what was installed on the system, I would 
use something like an "apt list | grep installed" and pipe the output 
into a file. But for "apt-get" this does not seem to be an option, so 
perhaps theres another way to get a list of installed packages using 
dpkg or such, I'm just not aware of that.
This way, you can then, after some cleanup in an editor for example, 
pipe the output of listed installed packages into the new system 
apt/apt-get and reinstall as available in the repository everything that 
was installed earlier, most likely.

Of course, after the home directories have been created accordingly 
using add user and copy and paste selectively from home to home of the 
backup media.

Good luck!

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Thread

Upgrading from very-old Debian The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2017-11-28 16:30 +0100
  Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2017-11-28 16:40 +0100
    Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2017-11-28 17:00 +0100
      Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2017-11-28 17:10 +0100
    Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2017-11-28 18:10 +0100
    Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> - 2017-11-29 10:10 +0100
      Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Jimmy Johnson <field.engineer@gmail.com> - 2017-11-29 20:00 +0100
      Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2017-11-29 20:10 +0100
        Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian davidson <davidson@freevolt.org> - 2017-11-30 21:20 +0100
        Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> - 2017-12-01 15:30 +0100
          Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2017-12-01 22:00 +0100
            Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian (and xtoolwait) David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2017-12-02 16:00 +0100
      Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Ric Moore <wayward4now@gmail.com> - 2017-11-29 21:30 +0100
  Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Patrick Bartek <nemommxiv@gmail.com> - 2017-11-28 18:00 +0100
    Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2017-11-28 18:00 +0100
      Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Jimmy Johnson <field.engineer@gmail.com> - 2017-11-28 23:40 +0100
      Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Jan <jan@dwrox.net> - 2017-11-29 08:00 +0100
        Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Umarzuki Mochlis <umarzuki@gmail.com> - 2017-11-29 08:20 +0100
        Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Michael Fothergill <michael.fothergill@gmail.com> - 2017-11-29 08:50 +0100
  Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2017-11-28 20:30 +0100
    Re: Upgrading from very-old Debian Michael Fothergill <michael.fothergill@gmail.com> - 2017-11-28 21:30 +0100

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