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Comment by kevindication | Hacker News Reader

Apt is the only system I've ever felt fully comfortable with when doing upgrades. It was neither a problem under Debian nor Ubuntu.

Do you have a tendency to make system changes that get in the way of the upgrades? (i.e., where has it gotten stuck for you before?)

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In the past I've found that if I installed packages that weren't in the main release I would sometimes run into gigantic dependency issues that I couldn't resolve without a clean reinstall.

I've never had a problem with a Debian in-place upgrade; I've got servers that have been upgraded from woody through to squeeze without a hitch. Where I've had problems with Ubuntu, it's been around the desktop, and udev/hotplug integration.

That being said, I've not given it a fair try for a few releases, so it's possible that in-place upgrades are better tested now, but I don't see the point of taking the risk. If it goes wrong, I'll end up reimaging anyway, so why waste the time?

I'm not the OP, but on my in-place upgrade to Natty today I had the nspluginwrapper installer die with a segfault. As a result, the update "failed" (only nspluginwrapper failed, really). I had to remove google-talkplugin to fix it (so really, the bug was in Google Talk, but apparently nobody at Canonical has Google Talk 64-bit installed to encounter this). So yes, seemingly-inconsequential system changes can interfere with upgrades.

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