Re: Attempted upgrade
On Mon, 29 May 2000, J.A. Bezemer wrote:
>
> On Sun, 28 May 2000, Philip Charles wrote:
>
> > 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).
>
I was rather pleased by this, all the CDs were burnt with a mkhybrid |
cdrecord pipe from identical disc trees. The differences were picked up.
In total I burnt 7 CDs, but only used 3. My drive had problems reading
CR-RWs. This was not part of the testing, but it did add to my
frustration!!
> >
> > 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.
>
Remember I am an idiot tester. In this case I was pretending to be
someone who had installed an early version of slink from a CD set and who
was quite satisfied with the system. So they had not bothered to follow
the intermediate releases. This person probably used dselect to install
new software and would slightly aprehensive about using dpkg to install
packages. S/he would almost certainly be using a stock kernel.
However, this user recognises that an upgrage should be made from 2.1 to
2.2. I knew my no. 2 system had not had general upgrades and would have
older dpkg and apt. So the test upgrade was very informative.
The advice I would give to someone who was intending to upgrade would be
to use the static versions of apt and dpkg in the upgrade directory
regardless.
Has the static dpkg in upgrade-i386 been fixed yet? Where do I get it?
> > 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)
Infomagic was the outfit that issued 1.0, and yes, I was one of the people
put off Debian as a result. My first successful install of Debian was
from Infomagic's 1.2 (Rex) and even then I had to download a whole raft of
packages and I don't want to go through that again! I will work from Bo,
1.3.1
> 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 ;-)
>
I think that an upgrade from 1.3.1 would be good enough. Let me know when
the static dpkg is fixed.
Phil.
-
Philip Charles; 39a Paterson St., Abbotsford, New Zealand; +64 3 4882818
Mobile 025 267 9420. I sell GNU/Linux CDs. See http://www.copyleft.co.nz
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