Upgrade report: Woody/KDE2.2 -> Sid+/KDE3.1

[Paul Cupis <paul@cupis.co.uk>]

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Hello,

A couple of days ago I dist-upgraded a Woody box to Sid+bits in order to 
test the upgrade path from KDE2.2 to KDE3.1.

This is long email - the interesting part is in the section titled 
'Problems' below.

Executive Summary:

The KDE3 packages are great and a clean upgrade path seems to be 
basically ready. It is (or course) pending the last few packages being 
uploaded, and dependancies modifying such that apt-get dist-upgrade 
from Woody->Sid now (or eventually Debian 3.0 to Debian 3.1) will 
include kdebase(-data).


System setup:

The original system was Debian Woody (i386). The only non-Woody 
packages/programs installed were an old backport of openoffice.org, a 
backported guarddog package and a third party Winmodem driver.

In effect, to do the upgrade I editted my sources.list and added 
'testing' and 'unstable' official Debian sources to match the 'stable' 
ones, and added the following two deb lines for kdenetwork and kdepim:

  deb http://people.debian.org/~ccheney/kde-other ./
  deb http://phebehouse.dyndns.org/pub/kdepim ./

I manipulated my /etc/apt/preferences file to depreciate use of 
Debian/stable and to give Debian/unstable preference. I also gave the 
two apt sources above (for kdenetwork/kdepim) a higher priority that 
Debian unstable, in order to depreciate the older debs for these 
packages currently available from official Debian mirrors.

As far as apt was concerned the available packages and priorities should 
match what an end user have available when KDE3 has been completely 
uploaded to Sid. My aim was to see how ready the packaging is for 
Woody->Released Sarge dist-upgrades.

The KDE installation on the machine was fairly typical (I believe) for a 
desktop machine - kdm, koffice, most of kdeadmin/kdegraphics, some of 
kdemultimedia and kdenetwork et cetera. KDE was the default/primary 
user environment on the machine.


The dist-upgrade:

With the above system setup, and with apt told that the machine should 
be sid+kdenetwork+kdepim, I ran:

  apt-get -u dist-upgrade

The actual upgrade was very smooth, especially as I was upgrading every 
installed app/package to Debian Sid, not just upgrading KDE. The only 
question I can remember being asked wrt KDE was about replacing the 
kdmrc file.


Problems?:

The (KDE) upgrade not only was quite hands-off, but worked very well, 
aside from just one thing.

During the dist-upgrade, apt removed the kdebase package, instead of 
upgrading it. This meant that the kdebase-data package was not pulled 
in, which meant that I did not get any .directory files installed in 
/usr/share/applnk, which in turn gave me a K-Menu which was messier 
than it should have been. Also, this package contains the KDE-default 
supplied desktop wallpapers - the kdewallpapers package from KDE2.2 
also remained installed (was not removed/upgraded).

For reference, running grep-available suggests only one KDE3 package in 
Debian Sid Dependng on or Recommending kdebase (kpat). Running 
grep-available with kdebase-data shows that only kdebase and kpat 
Depend or Recommend it.

I believe that kdebase-data must be required for more than just kpat, 
therefore I would like to see this fixed - perhaps some core KDE 
packages should Depend/Recommend kdebase(-data).

And before anyone else says it: kwin does Suggest: kdebase-data, but apt 
does not normally heed Suggestions of this sort, so that is not good 
enough. And I know that the new kde meta-package will Depend on 
kdebase, but I don't think that this will help in the general case of 
people upgrading from Debian 3.0 to 3.1.

How to reproduce?

  # apt-get remove kdebase-data
  $ update-menus

and look at your K-Menu.

How to fix?

  # apt-get install kdebase-data
  $ update-menus


Conclusion:

Thanks must go to all that have been working on these packages.

I will most likely be doing some more upgrade testng of this sort in the 
coming months... - please let me know if there is are any upgrade 
scenarios etc you would like testing and I'll see if I can accomodate 
you. It is not currently my intent to test upgrades from Ralf's Woody 
backport, but if people think that it would be useful, please let me 
know and I may change my mind.

Also, if there are any logs or other useful information which I might 
gather during these upgrades, please let me know.


Regards,

Paul Cupis
- -- 
paul@cupis.co.uk

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