Re: slink_cd 1.11

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Hello.

[ I have been unable to get the latest slink_cd package, so please
  forgive me if some or all of this have been fixed ].

Yesterday I downloaded the file binary-i386-1.iso from the 2.1r0 directory
in cdimage.debian.org (i.e. the one having a md5sum of
5e17befce2468a4197b81e89b2680a78), toasted it, and used it to upgrade my
system at home.

The upgrade was almost painless, but I have a lot of comments to make.
This is a list of things that, IMHO, could be fixed from this CD:

- There were a "frozen" symlink in the dists directory. Since
  slink is now "stable" I think a "stable" symlink should be enough.

- The general md5sum.txt file followed symlinks, when this is combined
  with the previous point, the result is that the files appeared three
  times each (one for slink, another one for stable, and another one
  for frozen). Including every file just once should be enough.

- The md5sum.txt file included itself :-) If we know that it will
  "always" fail, it would be nicer to exclude itself from the list.
  This will avoid the user to see that the command md5sum -c md5sum.txt
  "fails" because of a single file.

I think a command line like this:

find . -type f | grep -v "\./md5sum" | xargs md5sum > md5sum.txt

would solve the two previous points.


- Many files in dists/slink/main/upgrade-older-i386/deb-files
  were dangling symlinks.

- There was a `*.doc' file in the doc directory.


This is all about the "form", now about the "contents":


I used the "mountable" method to upgrade, and found the following
problems:

- I had to remove zlib1g-dev and svgalibg1-dev to be able to upgrade
zlib1g and svgalibg1. This is because hamm's zlib1g-dev and svgalibg1-dev
had a versioned dependency (using `=') on zlib1g and svgalibg1. However,
since zlib1g-dev and svgalibg1-dev were not available in the first CD I
could not upgrade the four packages at once, dselect complained
about the unsatisfied dependency.

Suggested fix: Include zlib1g-dev and svgalibg1-dev in the first CD.
Maybe they are not very popular but upgrading them may be a real pain
if they are in a different CD than zlib1g and svgalibg1.

- Due to hamm's dpkg-mountable unability to handle pre-dependencies, I
had to upgrade some packages by hand, namely libncurses4, slang1,
libstdc++2.9 and libreadlineg2. This is of course not CD's fault, but my
fault for not using APT :-)


After this the upgrade was quite smooth.

At the end:

- I wanted to remove slang0.99.38 but I couldn't, because some packages
still depended on it.

Suggested fix: Include whiptail and modconf in the first CD.

- syslinux appeared as "obsolete".

Suggested fix: Include syslinux in the first CD.

- gettext appeared as "obsolete"

Suggested fix: include gettext in the first CD (it is an almost-standard
package, since it is in the base system for slink).


In short: It would be really nice if the first CD included everything
which was in base in hamm or it is in base in slink.

Thanks.

-- 
 "c632bbabd792ded4602741f99c992c07" (a truly random sig)