On December 15, 2005 06:30 pm, Xiaofan Chen wrote:
> For the past two evenings I was struggling with the upgrade
> of Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary to 5.10 Breezy.

I've found that it's simply less trouble to keep the /home on a separate 
partition and reformat everything else fresh... (just speaking of 
Mandrake 7->8->10->10.2->2006)

Like you are finding-out, some packages depend on others, some upgrades 
are okay while others still need a bit of debugging. Other packages 
depend on new stuff that was never there... for example, just as a tiny 
example, I've contributed a little towards aspell, and for now, the 
0.60 series has word-list-compress, but the next version eventually 
does not have word-list-compress, but has prezip-bin instead... okay, 
so you update your computer, and something that used to look for 
word-list-compress says... "hey! wait a sec, where did that go?"

Long story short, you may find it easier to simply install fresh versus 
trying to search through all the dependencies which sometimes move on 
you.

In summary, keep your /home on a separate partition since you don't keep 
executables there, and wipe clean the rest... this also gets rid of 
cruft too :-) Then after installing the new stuff, reintroduce 
your /home/users

hope that helps, or at least cuts a lot of wasted time.
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