Slink -> Potato

[Ian Redfern <redferni@logica.com>]

I've just upgraded one of our development servers, a dual-CPU Dell
PowerEdge 2200, from 2.1r4 to the latest set of packages from 2.2. I had
a number of problems, but the machine seems to now be running happily
again.

Upgrade was via dselect, using apt file: (for local copy of main,
contrib and non-free) and apt ftp: (for non-US). Upgrade was performed
remotely via telnet - this seemed to not be a problem, unlike
hamm->slink.

This is a summary of the changes and problems I found, which may be
useful for the release notes.

There were a number of conflicts with mesag and glide - I just removed
any mesag/glide packages and continued.
A number of packages, such as egcs, checker, fgrep, fvwm2 etc. vanished,
as expected.
xntpd3 is now called ntp and does not upgrade automatically (bug 53532).

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  timezones libmd5-perl xproc fvwm2 libguile4 xscreensaver-gl perl
mysql-dev
  libcgi-perl libpam0g-util xmysql wxxt1 libatalk1 libreadlineg2-dev
  libstdc++2.9-dev libucdsnmp3.6 dftp ivtools perl-suid egcc newt0.25
  eterm-backgrounds lesstifg checker netstd kbd-data rgrep moonlight
gltt2
  alias mesag3 mysql-base www-search

There seem to have been the following major changes:
Name Service Switch has changed in the C Library.
menu-methods has changed and old AfterStep files are no longer supported

The new Perl doesn't support db 1.85 format files.
WARNING: the configuration format for modutils has changed!
You still have a /etc/cron.d/modutils file.
/etc/network/interfaces /etc/init.d/portmap /etc/init.d/inet and
/etc/init.d/networking have all appeared
The default MTA (for new installs, so not affecting this one) has
changed from smail to exim.

MySQL problem (bug raised):
Preparing to replace mysql-server 3.21.33b-2 (using
.../mysql-server_3.22.29-2.deb) ...
Stopping mySQL database server...kill: usage: kill [-s sigspec | -n
signum | -sigspec] [pid | job]... or kill -l [sigspec]
mysqld killed...done.

Lynx would not install, (bug raised)complaining:
dhelp_parse: You can add only directories under /usr/doc!

While setting up mirror, I got
shell-init: could not get current directory: [0801]:593921
and a pile of garbage on the screen (bug raised).
Similarly for PostgreSQL (bug raised) followed by
cd_links: could not get current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent
directories: Permission denied

The links to emacs failed to update so I needed to relink
/etc/alternatives/emacs manually - bug 33237.

I froze lynx and carried on with dselect.

When trying to upgrade dnsutils I got:
dpkg: error processing
/var/spool/mirror/debian/dists/frozen/main/binary-i386/net/dnsutils_8.2.2p5-5.deb
(--unpack):
 trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/dnsquery', which is also in package bind
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)

so I upgraded bind first manually. That worked fine, and then dnsutils
would install. Bug raised.

dselect was unable to upgrade libgtkmm-dev:
Preparing to replace libgtkmm-dev 0.9.15-1 (using
.../libgtkmm-dev_1.0.3-1.1.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libgtkmm-dev ...
dpkg: error processing
/var/spool/mirror/debian/dists/frozen/main/binary-i386/devel/libgtkmm-dev_1.0.3-1.1.deb
(--unpack):
 trying to overwrite `/usr/lib/Gtk--/include/gtk--config.h', which is
also in package libgtkmm
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)

This was problematic, because
  libgtkmm-dev: Depends: libgtkmm (= 0.9.15-1) but 1.0.3-1.1 is to be
installed
which meant libgtkmm could not be upgraded, which stopped any further
progress with dselect. A manual apt-get install on libgtkmm-dev fixed
the problem. Bug raised.

Samba wouldn't run on the 2.0.38 kernel the box was running, but
upgrading to 2.2.14 fixed that (bug 51331 - closed in error).

The machine seems now to be running happily. If any of our users find
anything broken, I'll post reports.

Thanks,
Ian Redfern (redferni@logica.com).