The insidious urge to fix what ain’t broke has arisen. I’ll probably follow the official documentation, unless someone has a better suggestion.
I’m not running anything unusual and I haven’t done much, if any, “customization”. I update packages maybe a couple of times a week, so they’re current.
Should I go ahead and put myself through this now, or wait until support is dropped and I’m forced?

  • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    5 days ago

    Most of my infra is Debian, and I did it without serious incident:

    #Update everything to latest
apt update && apt upgrade && apt full-upgrade && apt --purge autoremove
reboot

#Verify that debian_version is 12.x (STOP IF NOT 12!)
cat /etc/debian_version

#Check for any pinned or held packages
apt list '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))'
apt-mark showhold

#Swap bookworm for trixie in repo files
sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

#Carry out update
apt update
apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs -y
apt full-upgrade -y
reboot

#Verify that debian_version is 13.x
cat /etc/debian_version

#Modernize apt sources to v3
apt modernize-sources -y

    And then maybe apt update to make sure the updates still work OK.

    Sometimes you have to make changes to certain repos that don’t have Trixie manifests, but that’s easy enough to roll back.

    • AMillionMonkeys@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      5 days ago

      apt modernize-sources -y

      Thanks for this - I hadn’t seen it yet in the docs I’ve been looking at.
      No idea what it does, but it looks legit, so I’ll run it!

      • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        Apt v3 comes with some quality-of-life stuff that apt has been direly missing for years, and one of those is apt sources that make sense to a human.

        So the new apt source files have local key location, components, suites, and Uris.

        The sources from the before-time just had a one-liner with a uri and some components.

        Edit:also the modernize command makes a backup of the source files it touches.

  • phanto@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    5 days ago

    I snapshot my machine, set it to go overnight, went to bed. Woke up, 24% done “Do you want to use the package maintainer’s version?”. Grr. Went smooth though.

  • sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    The upgrade itself is never a problem.

    The real problem is when your server is running an old software that breaks after the update.

    For example I had an old php/drupal site and it broke after upgrading debian because the upgrade also updated php to a newer version that is not supported by that old version of drupal.

  • nibbler@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    I upgraded 50 boxes from 9 to 13 last week.

    The two dovecot were the most work. Some guacd had trouble with file permissions and I had to manually install and enable a few php8.4 packages and manually apply powerdns db migration scripts.

    Oh, powerdns renamed master/slave to primary/secondary, too.

  • username_1@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    0.076

    Update when you can afford downtime. The update should be painless but you know how it is: things go crazy when they shouldn’t. Every time.

  • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    I’ve yolo’d every major upgrade from debian 8 to 13 without any backups of configs and survived… (dont do that though)

    For most desktop systems where you’re not dicking around with files in /etc, there is almost no pain ever

    For servers, dealing with the “do you want to install the maintainers version of ____.conf”, sucks… trying to remember all the things i put in php.ini is a pain

    Probably skill issue

  • glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    The official docs have everything, though not as well ordered and concise as they could be.

    I’ve taken my server from 11 to 12 to 13. Only issue was 11->12 where backports caused some issue that I no longer remember the specifics of (never broke SSH link), so I just don’t fuck with backports anymore. You need to have your shit together for backports, from what I’ve gathered.

    12->13 was abs smooth as butter. Extra 3rd party repos weren’t even an issue. One I had to leave “bookworm” because they didn’t have trixie entries; I found it had no trixie entry by looking at the repo itself - it just kept working no problem after the upgrade anyway.
    And I have a “stretch” repo I took from 12 to 13 on another server (it’s mongoDB 4.4 for unifi, an abs shitshow of software those bozos cook up)

    Anyway tldr docs are good narry a problem will occur.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    Is it painful? I’ve upgraded several versions without difficulty. “third party” repositories are problematic so be sure you follow the guidelines about disabling them.