I’ve long been puzzled by the official advice on upgrading Drupal

It basically says you should delete everything, unpack a new Drupal version, and replace your customisations.

I like to use version control to manage my site.

Debian Etch has been serving me well for a few years with wonderfully easy and infrequent maintenance.

However it’s at the end of its life

http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100121

So I’ve upgraded to Lenny following these instructions

Drupal 6 has been out for a while now, Drupal 7 is in the works, and yet most sites still seem to be using Drupal 5. Is it time to upgrade yet?

If it was just the core features the answer would be simple, Drupal 6 is better and is fully stable.

The problem is that many (maybe most) of the features of a Drupal website are powered by contributed modules, and modules written for Drupal 5 don’t work with Drupal 6.