This is such a nice feature and will save everyone a lot of time. I remember I did a dist-upgrade in Ubuntu once and it worked nicely. I had been thinking for a while now that after 11.2 releases I will have to re-install all the tools(Libraries, IDE’s, etc) that I had installed on my 11.1 system. But if this feature works I will be such a happy man :).
this is one of those improvements that will have a huge unnoticed impact, and I commend all those responsible for the effort (not a trivial task indeed).
Wow - this is fantastic, and extremely important. Well done to those who are implementing this.
As an aside, in Solaris with ZFS, upgrading is very interesting as you can actually create a snapshot of the entire old install, then it upgrades to the new release. If there are problems, you have the old environment in a pristine and bootable state. This is also similar to the OLPC which retains the previous OS when and update is done. I think this model is pretty great, and perhaps some day we will see this more commonly in Linux distros in general. Of course, I’d love to see ZFS just released in whole GPL, but time will tell.
In any event - this dup support is really fantastic.
Why is this a new feature? I do use “zypper dup” for quite a time now to jump to the next top version. You have to dup befor you jump to the next release, than add the new repositories, disable the old repositories and than do dup again. Worked quite good for me on on 11.3 to 11.0 and 11.0 to 11.1 an on my vServer.
(I do have my vServer for 6 Month now and it was deliverd with 10.3) I do not know exactly since when I do use dup. I think since 11.0 factory.
Ok, In SLE it might be new: “With the introduction of the Zypper stack to SLE, we finally reached the state of a featureful (which YOU was not) and fast, reliable (which ZLM was not) update stack in the platform.”
And to cite this comment: “I think the “Debian” part of the title is missleading if what we want is just to support dup officially.”
