Re: Howto upgrade perl without removing everything
On Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:09:20 +0000
Wolodja Wentland <babilen@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 15:03 +0000, Richard wrote:
> > Hi,
> > Playing dangerously with Sid, and I've reached the limit of what it will upgrade to
> > without some help.
> > Nearly everything has a dependency on perl, the perl version has change, so how do just upgrade the
> > perl base.
> > I can't see the equivalent of rpm --nodeps in apt-get, and clean up the mess afterwards.
>
> Just to make this better known to people on the mailing lists as well ...
>
> Perl is currently in the transition from 5.12 to 5.14 and an overview of this
> particular transition [0] can be seen on [1] and of all other transitions on
> [2]. It should be quite obvious that the plethora of red in there is bad and
> that we strive to paint this page in green. More specifically all reverse
> dependencies have to be rebuilt againt the new perl version and uploaded to
> sid and this might take a while.
>
> The best strategy right now is *not* to upgrade perl-base (et al.) to 5.14,
> but wait until the transition progressed a bit. The easiest way is probably
> to run "(safe-)upgrade" instead of "dist-upgrade" right now and to cherry-pick
> other (unrelated, but held) packages directly.
>
> I can only stress once again that it is of uttermost importance to actually
> read and understand the actions that are proposed by apt-get/aptitude ... You
> might wonder why I mention this, but we already had a couple of people in
> #debian who complained that apt-get removed their kernel. (sic!)
>
> Furthermore there might still be people who *already* upgraded to the new perl
> version and face a horrible mess right now. There are a couple of ways to deal
> with this:
>
> 1. Reinstall stable, consider the lesson to be learnt and work on something
> more important
> 2. Restore from backups
> 3. Downgrade selected packages to either the version in wheezy or the previous
> version. This can be done with "dpkg -i", but using aptitude install
> foo=1.2.3 or by pinning [3] the packages to a specific version with a
> priority >= 1001 followed by a dist-upgrade. (which will actually downgrade
> the packages)
> 4. Downgrade the complete system to wheezy. The idea is more or less the same
> as in 3. only that you downgrade all packages from sid to wheezy. This can
> be done by pinning wheezy to a priority >= 1001 as, for example, with the
> following /etc/apt/preferences:
>
> --- snip ---
> Package: *
> Pin: release a=testing
> Pin-Priority: 1001
> --- snip ---
>
> It should be noted that 3. and 4. are absolutely *unsupported* and might not
> work at all. People have, however, successfully downgraded their systems. Liek
> always: Make sure that your backups are up-to-date, complete and that you know
> how to restore them.
>
> [0] A transition occurs when changes in a package require alterations to
> several other packages which depend on it. To do this, many packages using
> the package are updated, either being recompiled or updated to a new
> version; packages blocking a transition might be removed from <testing> so
> it can complete. Transitions can become very large and complex, involving
> tens or even hundreds of packages.
> [1] http://release.debian.org/transitions/html/perl5.14.html
> [2] http://release.debian.org/transitions/
> [3] http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/howto/debian.html#errata
> http://wiki.debian.org/AptPreferences
> "man apt_preferences"
Thanks for the transition tracker url, I'll watch that closely.
I'll be very interested when python 2.7 is finished , I suspect I have some apps that will bork
on it.
Luckily I didn't get caught with my kernel, just the mailer which was quickly reinstalled.
cheers
--
Best wishes / 73
Richard Bown
e-mail: richard@g8jvm.com or richard.bown@blueyonder.co.uk
nil carborundum a illegitemis
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