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Debian upgrades

posted by [personal profile] emperor at 01:59pm on 08/08/2008
I upgraded my home system to Debian's latest stable release last night, a process that was long overdue. I'd delayed it because I feared it would involve Pain, and indeed it did (and there's still the exim3-4 migration to deal with).

The first bit of pain was caused by my having libnfslock installed, which last appeared in Debian in around 2000. That tells you how long this machine (in some sense) has been going for. There was the problem that aptitude had removed some things (prior to re-installing them), and then stopped because of too many errors, and then when re-started seemed to have forgotten about some of the things that got removed, and of course X broke.

It strikes me that one really ought to be able to upgrade from one Debian release to another without invoking any of the --force options to dpkg. A virtualised machine for developers to play with (and keep testing upgrades) might help, as might an automated system that installed a base system, a load of other stuff, and tried to upgrade.

Or maybe it's just rose-tinted specs that suggest that the upgrade to Slink was much smoother!

IWBNI if there was something with the UI of apt-get but with a more dpkg-ftp-like approach to dependancies. ISTR [livejournal.com profile] mtbc100 muttering about one ages back.
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There are 18 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
toothycat: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] toothycat at 01:13pm on 08/08/2008
I'd be curious to know how much pain is involved in exim3-4 migration these days. I've been wondering about switching to 4 for a while now, mainly so I can get greylistd going.
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emperor: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] emperor at 01:20pm on 08/08/2008
There is a converter, which will do some of the work (though it's getting a bit long in the tooth); advice seems to be that the package maintainers' scheme is mad unless it does almost entirely what you want, and you're better producing a single config-file of your own.
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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] randomchris.livejournal.com at 01:37pm on 08/08/2008
I'm afraid posts like this are the reason I run screaming from anything that looks remotely opensource...
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emperor: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] emperor at 01:39pm on 08/08/2008
If it was my desktop, I'd have just installed the new version afresh, which would be entirely straightforward.

Ubuntu has made linux for desktop really easy.
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seconded

posted by [identity profile] olithered.livejournal.com at 02:01pm on 08/08/2008
Seriously: try the latest ubuntu - I'm sure you'll be impressed!
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ext_27570: Richard in tricorn hat (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] sigisgrim.livejournal.com at 02:01pm on 08/08/2008
To be fair-(ish), it's not so much opensource, per say; rather it is OSs (mail servers, etc.) which are primarily designed and developed by and for tech-y people (aka geeks) who are seriously into those things.

I have in the past very happily run various opensource things on top of a Windows box by applying the same approach to installing them as I would do a purchased application. It's when you get things like --force that it gets scary...
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posted by [identity profile] pjc50.livejournal.com at 02:19pm on 08/08/2008
To be fair, you can get the same effect on a windows machine by not reinstalling from scratch over 8 years, just upgrading...

Or try to upgrade the C: drive of a Windows machine without a reinstall. That's a fun one.

My most recent upgrade and the one I made my parents do have both been to buy entirely new machines. :)
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ext_27570: Richard in tricorn hat (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] sigisgrim.livejournal.com at 02:47pm on 08/08/2008
Yes, OSs don't really seem to upgrade very well, regardless of whether they are M$ or opensource. My policy is to get a new machine and simply use it until it runs out of steam without doing any major upgrades at all. My W2K machine was bought in 2001 and is still going strong on the same OS. The only hardware changes are the addition of a network card and some second HDD swaps.

I'm in the process of changing over to a Vista 64bit machine. I don't plan on changing that for many years. Though I will be recreating the old machine with Ubuntu. When I'm happy with that I fully expect to apply the same policy.
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pm215: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] pm215 at 02:59pm on 08/08/2008
Actually, Ubuntu come the closest to a completely pain-free version upgrade that I've encountered so far.
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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] damerell.livejournal.com at 03:13pm on 08/08/2008
chiark was first installed in 1993 running Debian 0.96. It has been incrementally upgraded since then. Let's see you take a Windows 3.11 box and upgrade it to Vista through every subsequent version of Windows without doing a reinstall.
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pm215: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] pm215 at 06:29pm on 08/08/2008
chiark was first installed in 1993 running Debian 0.96

The Debian project history says that Debian 0.91 wasn't released until 1994, so I think your details are probably a little out.

The point still stands in general, of course; mnementh was originally a 0.93r6 install in 1996, with incremental upgrades ever since.

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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] olithered.livejournal.com at 02:02pm on 08/08/2008
You upgraded through 4 versions at once?!
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emperor: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] emperor at 02:03pm on 08/08/2008
No, that package just never got removed.
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cjwatson: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] cjwatson at 05:03pm on 08/08/2008
FWIW I never have to use --force-anything (except for maybe --force-overwrite, which hardly counts as it's sometimes been on by default in dpkg anyway), to an excellent first approximation. I think I must be much more prone to investigating the dependency tree and figuring out the resolutions than other people I see complaining about upgrade problems.
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emperor: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] emperor at 05:05pm on 08/08/2008
It was --force-overwrite that I had to use. aptitude, OTOH, seems a little more --force-happy...
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pm215: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] pm215 at 06:34pm on 08/08/2008
A friend recently ended up needing --force-bad-path after an unintended partial upgrade (because he had 'stable' in the sources.list) somehow managed to remove sysvinit...
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ext_243: (0wned)

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posted by [identity profile] xlerb.livejournal.com at 08:37pm on 08/08/2008
Back in 2000/2001 or so, when I was tracking unstable/sparc64, I got into places where I'd have to force-remove and reinstall stuff. This is a reasonable maneuver for some packages. This is not a reasonable maneuver for libc6. And it was a bit late at night that I was doing this, IIRC....
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cjwatson: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] cjwatson at 07:25am on 09/08/2008
I don't understand people who don't go over the removal list with a fine tooth-comb, either! :-)
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