Re: Testing upgrade and consequences
On Wednesday 14 March 2001 5:40 pm, Martin WHEELER wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> > He upgraded
> > from a Potato 2.2r2 system to current "testing" and most things broke
> > in serious ways, such that he swears he will never again move from
> > stable releases.
>
> And *how*.
>
> NEVER again. (Certainly not for client-critical systems.)
<delurk>
This salutory tale has a number of lessons for us all.
Firstly _NEVER_ trust the software. Even if it is dselect/apt-get/whatever
and Debian. Always RTFM then read the message you're getting back and if
you don't like what you see _bail out_.
Secondly don't, IMO, expect anything on the bleeding edge to work properly.
Debian has two beautiful aspects (speaking as a refugee from NT and
RedHat): it is very conservative and hence very stable; and apt-get install
is one of the neatest ideas I've seen. The important thing there is the
first point, this rather than freedom should be the USP of Debian as far as
business is concerned. Systems don't have to chase beta releases of every
package, only upgrade if you _need_ to (e.g. if you must have USB support
in your kernel).
Thirdly, keep a backup. Do one now just to make sure.
I've only been using Debian GNU/Linux for a couple of months and early on I
tried to do a dist-upgrade or similar. Got a message saying that broadly my
whole system was about to be nuked and quickly pressed Ctl-C. Now I accept
lagging behind a little, I've upgraded KDE to 2.1, but otherwise very
little will change on this box.
As regards packages which are imporant but which may not be *Debianized*, I
put things like Java, Star Office and Adobe Acrobat in /opt. If you have
/opt and /home on different partitions to / then you can keep anything
important and unique to you quite safe. The Debian tools are then
relatively free to play with _their_ packages without endangering _your_
applications. I mention this because Martin seems to have lost things like
SGML DTDs which should never have been placed in unsafe locations. I have
two installs on my hard drive, one's a small emergency system so that if my
main install gets damaged I can still access /home and /opt _and_ save
those areas if I reinstall.
Final thought, are these Debain tools suitable for business users? Should
any business auto-update anything? Probably not, certainly not on a
critical system. Businesses should use stable + security updates +
upgrading key software only if it provides vital features.
IMO, of course.
</delurk>
--
Chris Bates (chris@wombats.freeserve.co.uk)
Web Programming: Developing Internet Applications
published by John Wiley & Sons, Sept, 2000
http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cms/teaching/crb
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