Upgrade report from "bo" to "hamm" :-(
Hi all,
i just wanted to report how i upgraded two Debian "bo" machines to
"hamm" recently. It was not really nice although it worked. Please
excuse my frustration which you will encounter here. This is not
meant to annoy anybody, but rather as pointing to a very weak point of
Debian. The machines in question are BTW a i486DX-2/66 with 32MB RAM
and a AMD-K6/200 with 64MB RAM.
The initial update to libc6 via the autoup.sh went very smooth and
flawlessly. I fetched the .deb packages via FTP over a decent
bandwith and this went pretty fast. The bad thing afterwards was the
painfully slo o o o o w w w w unpacking and installation process with
"dpkg" especially on the slower machine, but believe me, this was no
fun either on the K6 machine.
The final killer was the configuration process at the end which asked
questions i wouldn't really want to bother answering and where i
mostly simply accepted the default by constantly pressing enter.
Can't this be automated and the questioning be minimized to a more
acceptable degree? I would like to see an upgrade mechanism which
would allow me to start it and go home, checking all configuration
issues the next morning. I see no problem in packages dictating the
sysadmin a certain default, possibly coming along with a nice script
for later customization and fine tuning.
I ended up with an upgrade process of a little more than five hours.
These valuable five hours of my life are quite a loss for me and i
would have liked to spend the larger part of this time with more
urgent things.
While i really like the Debian packaging mechanism i really do hate
it's incredible slowness when it's coming to complete upgrades. In a
corporate environment this really is no option and i sincerely hope
that dpkg can somehow fetch up with the speed RPM is offering ASAP.
Actually i keep wondering why a speedy and possibly enhanced RPM
together with a decent packaging policy like Debian has should be such
a bad thing? With all the improvements contributed with such nice
frontends like "apt" i mostly see the fixing of a symptom but no
complete renovation.
Thank you, P. *8^)
--
--------- Paul Seelig <pseelig@goofy.zdv.uni-mainz.de> -----------
African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
Johannes Gutenberg-University - Forum 6 - 55099 Mainz/Germany
--------------- http://www.uni-mainz.de/~pseelig -----------------
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: