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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>and non-merged installations upgrading to it will break.

This is unacceptable. Updating your operating system should not cause it to break. Alpine should be responsible for the migration and not forcing users to do manual work else breaking their machines.

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The only way it can break is if you skip straight to forward to a release that no longer contains the tooling allowing you to make the transition cleanly. They outlined this is the article.

And updating Alpine to a new release is already a manual action.

Even if the tooling is available they require you to run it automatically instead of the operating system handling this for you. Your operating system will break if you don't take a manual action.

Simply do the merge.

> Alpine should be responsible

"AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND

That is not an excuse for them to purposefully break people's computer. The benefit of computers is all of this can be automated or walk users through how to fix things. But for some reason Linux distros keep breaking people's operating systems and then take no responsibility in fixing people's systems. These kind of actions hurt the adoption and trust people have in these projects.

This or at very least wait until a major version update like 4.0 so that if an installation breaks it's likely during a major uplift or refresh or greenfield deployment.

I don't think Alpine Linux 4.0 is scheduled for release until after Python 4.0

Alpine isn't a distro one would upgrade. It is usually used for throwaway containers, so the upgrade path is clear: throw the old one away, create a new one.

I have Alpine installed on many physical and virtual machines all around the USA. I know I am not alone on this. Some VPS providers also offer it as an installation option and some VM's are long-lived.

There's at least two of us! I've upgraded through more than 10 releases on some boxes.

I run Alpine on metal, and I approve TFA. Thank you to the alpine team for your transparency and your efforts!

Make that three :). Alpine is my "daily driver" on my laptop. I have several very long lived cloud VMs running it too. I know it has the reputation as "just" a container OS, but it's a pretty regular Linux distro. I think it's a joy to use on a daily basis! (I also believe it can't be that uncommon to daily drive it.)

I run Alpine as the OS on my home router. It's probably the most comprehensible distribution, I feel like it's actually possible for a mere mortal to understand the system. There are dozens of us!

here's a refund :)

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