Debian 13, and a rebuild that took an afternoon

A major distribution release, and a rebuild rather than an upgrade, which took four hours because the provisioning script had been fixed in February.

February: four attempts, 41 minutes each, to provision
a fresh host from a script that had never been run.

August: one attempt, 22 minutes, on a new major version.

what changed in between: nothing except that the script
now describes a machine rather than an increment.

the two things that did break:
  a package renamed again
  a PHP extension whose distribution package moved to a
    different repository

The February exercise is what made August an afternoon, which is the return on doing something uncomfortable six months earlier. It is also the argument for rebuilding on every major rather than upgrading in place — the script gets exercised, and the exercise is what keeps it true.