Re: Sarge-based Debian-Edu/Skolelinux 2.0 Released as Stable
Gavin McCullagh wrote:
>>According to one of Finn-Arne's Installation Manuals, "we are almost
>>there". Alas, I can't relocate this annotation to one of his changelogs.
>
> Any idea when that was? I would have assumed a clean upgrade was part of
> the 2.0 release requirements but perhaps not.
It was removed in the last versions of the document, as I had give up on
the "clean upgrade path".
Well, you can read about it at
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/UpgradeFrom1.0
And then judge for yourself. I felt it was more important to stop people
from installaing the woody-version ~5 years after most of it's software
was released, than to make a clean upgrade path.
Please read the howto, and if you find more that might causes you
trouble, please add a footnote.
What is causing us trouble in short is:
- 2 perl packages, that leaves perl in an un-upgradable state (dont
remember the exact bug though)
- inconsistance in the ldap db. To put it short:
* we have some groups that have an empty field "Member"
* the ldap upgrade script is removing the empty fields
* when the new DB is imported, the missing field "Member" is causing
an error in slapadd, because the objectClass requires the "member"
field.
I think this happens if any of the groups admins, teachers, jradmins
or studens is empty.
I've seen more errors, but those are more obscure, and I didn't make a
note of them. But I've done some upgrades, and only a few have broken
durng the upgrade. And I've never been on site when doing the upgrade.
> Right. To be honest, I'd really rather not reinstall from scratch and I
> kind of hope I can work around any upgrade hickups which come along, I'd
> just like to have some idea if anyone knows what I may come across.
I guess you'll manage
> Also, I sort of presume I'd need to use apt-cdrom and dist-upgrade rather
> than an online repository as much of this couldn't be in the ordinary
> debian sarge repository (or this release would have been ready a year ago).
make sure you have the following line in your sources.list
deb http://ftp.skolelinux.no/skolelinux sarge local
>>Maybe you find the time to try it and file a bug report ;)
>
> I guess a bug report on the fact that upgrading is not documented. For all
> I know, the upgrade may be plain sailing.
Well, it's kind of documented, but you can make the documentation better.
But one thing that we can learn, is that we need a lot of tester
_before_ debian etch is released as stable. I think at least that the
upgrade trouble of the perl files should have been taken care of before
sarge was released. That is why we need to work on the reelase of etch
now, to make sure all our "needed" packages are availible before etch is
frozen. Then we'll have ~5 months to find all the bugs preventing a
clean upgrade. Of course it would have been nice if we could find the
bugs preventing a clean upgrade before etch is frozen, but I have my
doubt that we will manage. In fact, if we had not managed to release 2.0
now, we would have ben worse off.
As said - get all your stable production servers upgraded into sarge
now, and then help us test the upgrade path to etch.
--
Finn-Arne Johansen
faj@bzz.no http://bzz.no/
Debian-edu developer and Solution provider
EE2A71C6403A3D191FCDC043006F1215062E6642 062E6642
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