Problem during upgrade from 08.04 LTS to 10.04.1 LTS

[Tom H]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 5:10 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 17 January 2011 09:42, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 5:30 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>> On 16 January 2011 22:20, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'd be interested to know what's special about an LTS to LTS upgrade.
>>>> There's no reason why an 8.04 to 10.04 upgrade'd be successful but an
>>>> 8.10 to 10.10 upgrade wouldn't be - other than marketing. If done
>>>> carefully, both these upgrades should be possible given that it's
>>>> possible (and possibly encouraged) to upgrade from one Debian version
>>>> to another when they're published 2-3 years apart.
>>>
>>> The difference is that the upgrade software is designed to cope with
>>> LTS to LTS but otherwise only one release at a time.  This is so that
>>> a user can specifically choose to use only LTS versions.
>>
>> The upgrade tool's set up to allow you to go from 8.04 to 10.04 and
>> not from 8.10 to 10.10 but there's no technical reason why an upgrade
>> from 8.10 to 10.10 wouldn't be successful when an upgrade from 8.04 to
>> 10.04 would be.
>
> There is a technical reason, which is that the tool has not been setup
> to cope with 8.10 to 10.10.  The work has not been done to allow that.
>  If you meant that there is no technical reason why the tool *could*
> have been setup to cope with it then you are likely correct, but
> presumably it was judged that the effort in doing this was not
> worthwhile.

I agree with the latter part of your last email. For the tool not to
have been set up to allow a non-LTS version to be upgraded to a
non-consecutive version is a fake technical reason. It's a more or
less understandable decision given that any upgrade can go south
easily but...