Matthew's Journal

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 mtbc100 muttering about one ages back.