Re: Shall Debian's su conform to other implementations
On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > Besides, depends/pre-depends and conflicts should be more than enough if
> > done right.
>
> Yes, this is what is meant by supporting partial upgrades. "Supporting
Ah, ok. THAT is what I meant too, in a roundabout way. So we're in
agreement.
> partial upgrades" doesn't mean "any given package should be upgradable on
> its own without upgrading any others"; it means "no apt-get install command
> should be able to break the system".
Too bad this isn't really true, it is usually a bad idea to mix
oldstable+stable for more time than what is strictly necessary to upgrade
the entire system to stable. Not all dependencies are always correctly
expressed as versioned dependencies metadata. So you can get breakages that
the maintainers don't know about and would never test for explicitly.
The people doing backports actually help a LOT to track down these bugs as
they happen :-)
> > New shadow would conflict with ALL packages that do not support the new
> > syntax
>
> Unfortunately, yes; and we saw plenty of occasions in woody->sarge where
> conflicts with old packages made the upgrade path more difficult than it
> should have been...
Unfortunately it is all we can do to insure proper consistency.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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