Re: Changing from stable to testing.....

[Hendrik Boom <hendrik@topoi.pooq.com>]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 02:42:54PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 07:39:52PM +0200, sigi wrote:
> > Hi Whit, 
> > 
> > last time I tried to dist-upgrade to squeeze, I got stuck in an 
> > (for me) unresolvable loop: 
> > The system wanted to upgrade the kernel-image and udev in one run - 
> > which failed. apt-get always complained, that the kernel-image needs the 
> > new udev-package to upgrade - and udev itself needed the new 
> > kernel-image... 
> > 
> > I don't know, if this problem still exists - if yes: you should find a 
> > way of not getting into this loop, where no "apt-get -f install" helped 
> > to stop this. I reinstalled lenny after this... ;) 
> 
> Yeah udev needs 2.6.27 or higher, so you have to upgrade the kernel first,
> then reboot, then do the whole upgrade.
> 
> I have no idea what the plan for handling the upgrade is officially.
> Maybe the release notes are supposed to offer some hint.

I've had problems like this several times, in several upgrades from an 
old stable to a new.  Sometimes X, sometimes udev, and once running out 
of disk space for the upgrade.  Usually I end up with an unusable 
system.  Not acceptable for a production system.

As a result I always copy the old stable system into separate 
partition(s), so that when an upgrade fails I can boot into the other 
copy and have
Because of these problems on a production machine, I've gradually 
learned to copy the old stable system into a separate partition, and 
then chroot to that to upgrade the copy while the old system is still 
running.

Of course, things go wrong this way, too.  Some packages want to 
fiddle with /proc during upgrade, and it isn't there.  I'm not at 
all sure whether to provide it.  Often things can be patched by booting 
to the incompletely updated new system and resuming the upgrade.  This 
does reduce the amount of time the productin system is in an unusable 
state.

I'd really like it if there were to be viable instructions in the 
release notes how to upgrade in a chroot, but I've never seen them.

-- hendrik