I believe that the reason why debian doesn't have a do-release-upgrade
is that upgrades from one stable to the next are supported (and have
been since time immemorial) without the need to do anything out of the
ordinary, but something like:
* change the lines in /etc/apt/sources.list to point to the new release
* apt update
* apt dist-upgrade
of course, Debian as a project only tests and supports this for
installations that come from the official installer and don't add
packages from 3rd parties, but the closer one is to that situation, the
more likely the upgrade is going to work without issues.
I'm consdering trying that route with my recalcitrant BBB, I guess
I'll need to go from Wheezy -> Jessie -> Stretch, i.e. two stages but
that's not too bad.
Just to let anyone interested know the above did (eventually) work.
I have managed to upgrade my old BBB from Debian 7 (wheezy) to Debian
8 (Jessie). I had to repeat the 'apt-get update;apt-get upgrade'
sequence quite a few times and had to kill a few hanging dpkg
processes on the way but I made it in the end. I now have a good
Debian 8 installation that I can keep up to date fairly easily.
One oddity is that it no longer automounts the microSD card though I
can mount it manually.
Moving to Debian 9 I think I will leave to a later date, it took me
long enough to get to Debian 8!
On Sat, 23 Jun 2018 12:20:05 +0100, Chris Green
<cl@isbd.net> declaimed the following:
One oddity is that it no longer automounts the microSD card though I
can mount it manually.
Automounting only appeared in something like two or three of the
"latest-images" releases for Wheezy. My original BBB with Wheezy did not do
it, after the second or so version was flashed, it did start to automount,
and then when Jessie came it no longer automounted.
Hmmm, time to update again -- I see a new image (Stretch 9.4) has been
posted... ( Latest Software Images - BeagleBoard )
auto-mounting was a feature of the "lxde" desktop..
Regards,
I wish it was as easy for me!
However I think I can probably get to stretch by the same procedure as
I used to get from wheezy to jessie. I really would like to get rid
of some of the GUI before doing that though.