Re: Attempted upgrade
On Sun, 28 May 2000, Philip Charles wrote:
> I did an upgrade on my no. 2 system today. An AMD K5 with 32 MB RAM
> running a custom 2.2.14 kernel with SCSI emulation for the CDROM drive.
> The system had a /usr partition with about 720 MB installed. It was a
> useful test. It was a working system and no longer a stock installation.
> I used dpkg 1.4.0.35 and apt 0.3.14 which were on the machine.
>
> First the good news.
> The installation system is very robust. I had burnt CD-RWs and the CDROM
> drive did not like parts of them. apt-get would exit and it could be
> restarted with apt-get -f -u install, and it would carry on where it had
> left off. When I finally was forced to burn CD-R disks it was simply a
> matter of removing the CD references in /etc/apt/sources.list and running
> apt-cdrom add again. This was needed as apt did not recognise the newly
> burnt CDs. apt-get picked up where it had left off.
IIRC apt recognzes CDs by `ls -lR | md5sum` which would've been different for
those CDs (if only the creation date of the directories).
>
> Now the bad news:- the dance of the seven discs.
Seven? RW's without and R's with non-free (or vice versa)? That would at least
explain my remark above.
> "..asked to insert specific CD-ROMs at several points during the upgrade
> ..." At the very least I had to change discs 100 times. Often only one
> package would be installed before a change, I was lucky if six packages
> installed. At several points apt was confused itself and asked for the
> disc that it was already using. Only a madman like myself would persist
> to the end. This bug makes upgrading by CD totally impractical.
Ah, but you're using apt 0.3.14? "Minimal CD swaps" is only in 0.3.17's
changelog... I myself did 1.3.1r0 -> 2.1r4 with static apt 0.3.18 and had to
insert Binary-1 and -2 only twice, but that was probably because there was an
error in fvwm95's postinst which caused me to restart apt.
>
> Now back to some better news.
> dpkg exited during the configuration with errors. However, dpkg
> --configure -a ran nicely and when it had finished dpkg --audit showed no
> problems.
That's pretty much what I'd expect. Thanks for the feedback!
>
> My no.2 machine is available for further upgrade testing. I have 1.3.1,
> 2.0.0 and 2.1 - I also have an old Infomagic set which I suspect has 1.0.0
(AFAIK Debian jumped from 0.99 to 1.1, so I suspect your Infomagic set will
be 1.1)
Well... I'm saying everywhere that with the static apt/dpkg you can upgrade
1.1 -> 2.2 at once, but I never actually tried ;-) So if you have the time,
I'd love to see some factual data. If you can boot 1.1, and can also boot 2.2
after the upgrade, that's enough already for a "we tested it successfully"
claim ;-)
Regards,
Anne Bezemer
Reply to: