RPi4 on Buster & weewx 5.1 upgrade to Trixie & weewx 5.2

[mike.t...@noworries.plus.com]

I've searched and not found any similar conversations so hopefully I'm not repeating something that's already been answered.

I'm currently running weewx 5.1 on Buster on a RPi4. Weewx has been upgraded numerous times since 2013 and the current installation of weewx has the code under weewx-venv and my templates, DB, etc under /home/weewx. I'm still having to run weewx as root and hence I think my 5.1 installation may not be too clean.

There's clearly numerous permutations to get to weewx 5.2 with my current templates and data on trixie but the two I'm focusing on are either;

a) upgrade to weewx 5.2, check weewx is OK and then upgrade RPi to trixie in situ 

or

b) clean install of Trixie, clean install of weewx5.2, and copy across my templates, db etc    

I'm leaning towards option b) but interested to know what others have done or any pitfalls /advice regarding either option.

Thanks in advance

Mike

[vince]

There were multiple long discussions recently....

Personally I never do in situ major os upgrades so I always recommend (b), but others differ in opinion.  (a) does work with some caveats and gory details.

For (b) you need to set up a new venv so you need to pip install any added modules you rely on.  Pretty straightforward.  You're starting over cleanly.

For (a) buster=>trixie changes your os python version from 3.11 to 3.13 if I remember correctly.  This will break your venv and systemd startup files which resolve to the old version.   In some cases debian removes the old python3.11 dpkgs (which you can reinstall by adding them back in specifically), but you will need to tweak the venv/bin python3 symlinks to point to that specific version, since by default it resolves to the os python3.

Given you have a system that's been around forever, I'd sure go with (b) to start over nice and cleanly.  At a minimum if your pi has been around for many years perhaps tossing a new SD card in there might make sense too

[mike.t...@noworries.plus.com]

Many Thanks Vince. Good excuse to get another Pi and build it up in parallel