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I upgraded my work desktop (a MacPro) to Lenny today. Ignoring kernel questions for now, it was less satisfactory an experience than I would have liked. This was an upgrade of a reasonably recent etch desktop, kept up-to-date. By now, you really ought to be able to make this sort of upgrade Just Work, without faffing around.
It didn't work; I followed the instructions in the release notes, but the initial
A smaller grumble is that
It didn't work; I followed the instructions in the release notes, but the initial
aptitude upgrade, after thinking for a very long time, announced it couldn't solve the dependancies. At this point, the release notes are silent. I managed to get it working, by variously removing or installing the troublesome packages, but really. What's a normal user going to do at this point?A smaller grumble is that
aptitude upgrade is apparantly deprecated, so you get a warning from aptitude every time you use that command. That's really really sloppy.
irritated
(no subject)
After the initial
aptitude upgradethought for fifteen minutes and said no, I tried uninstalling the packages it complained about with the intention of putting them back at the end, but when that didn't help I turned it intoapt-get upgradewhich seemed to work fine, then followed up withaptitude dist-upgradeas you might expect. When I helpedaptitude upgradewas to ignore it:aptitude upgradeis supposed to upgrade everything it can upgrade without installing extra packages, and if the answer is "there isn't anything" then one shrugs and moves straight on to the fulldist-upgrade. That made sense to me in hindsight, but I didn't think of it myself, so it would have been nice if the release notes had foreseen that circumstance and mentioned what I ought to do.The release notes might also have mentioned
aptitude safe-upgrade, as you say; either by advising me to use it in the first place, or including some comment along the lines of "don't worry about that warning this time round", as appropriate.And they might have given a bit of background on what all those "open; closed; defer; conflict" messages from aptitude were: I'd guess that for most users working through that document this will be the first time they'd encountered them, so at least some comment like "don't worry, it'll finish thinking eventually" or "here's how to guess how long it might take" would have been good. I actually googled to find out what was happening (and, entertainingly, the top hit was this blog post which discusses constructing a special Debian package repository in order to get the aptitude problem-solving algorithm to solve Sudoku :-).
Still, on balance this was a better upgrade than the last one. Aptitude didn't actually uninstall itself and terminate, and I only had to reconfigure one package from scratch after the upgrade (MediaWiki) as opposed to two last time (MediaWiki and CUPS). Now all I need is to find out which fonts package I should install that isn't hideous.
(no subject)
This seems to be the common reaction, but I told it to *install* (ie upgrade) them instead, which seems to me to be a better way of fixing the dependency issue. So for instance I got:
and I didaptitude install ghostscript, which then said:The following packages have unmet dependencies: libcups2: Conflicts: libcupsys2 (< 1.3.7-6) but 1.2.7-4etch6 is installed and it is kept back. ghostscript: Conflicts: gs (< 8.62) but 8.54.dfsg.1-5etch1 is installed and it is kept back. Conflicts: gs-gpl (< 8.62) but 8.54.dfsg.1-5etch1 is installed and it is kept back. The following actions will resolve these dependencies: Install the following packages: ghostscript-x [8.62.dfsg.1-3.2lenny0 (stable)] Upgrade the following packages: gs [8.54.dfsg.1-5etch1 (now) -> 8.62.dfsg.1-3.2lenny0 (stable)] gs-gpl [8.54.dfsg.1-5etch1 (now) -> 8.62.dfsg.1-3.2lenny0 (stable)] libcupsys2 [1.2.7-4etch6 (now) -> 1.3.8-1lenny4.1 (stable)]which is obviously a sensible resolution and you can tell it to do it. Then you don't have to remember to reinstall anything later, and at some pointaptitude upgradewill actually work.I don't know whether going straight for dist-upgrade rather than doing an upgrade first is more likely to produce solutions that uninstall stuff you wanted to keep, but presumably the release notes say to do it that way for a reason...