upgrade or clean installation?

[Derek Broughton]

Darryl Clarke wrote:

> On 4/23/06, Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera at zmsl.com> wrote:
>> Jan Moren wrote:
>> >>Why? What do you mean by keeps the PC clean? Ubuntu doesn't naturally
>> >>degrade over time.
>> >
>> > I do the same. It's just like moving house every five years or so -
>> > you've accumulated a bunch of cruft, and cleaning out and starting over
>> > means a lighter, simpler life (of course, you just start accumulating
>> > again).
>>
>> This is a flawed comparison. Operating systems are not like houses. The
>> filesystem doesn't naturally get littered over time. At most, consider a
>> clean up of your home directory.

Of course, file systems _do_ get littered over time.  And not just your home
directory.  At the current time, I have 11 directories under /usr/local. 
I'm fairly certain they're _all_ garbage.  I shudder to think about what
I've left lying around in /etc.

> If users are worried about old, unused packages, these can easily be
> removed using Synaptic or Aptitude (and friends)

_Finding_ the unused packages, otoh, is a time consuming PITA. aptitude does
help, but I still have to manually go through the packages every now & then
to find the ones I want to clean up.

> These packages will end up with a status of 'Installed (Local or
> Obsolete)' in Synaptic, or you can find them under "Obsolete and
> Locally created packages' in Aptitude.

That's just the rare case where aptitude has superceded something and not
removed it automatically.  The packages I have installed but no longer use
are a much larger set at most times.
-- 
derek