Re: Upgrade report from "bo" to "hamm" :-(

[Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es>]

On Tue, Jun 23, 1998 at 05:07:37AM +0200, Paul Seelig wrote:
[...]
> 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.
[...]

There are a few problems with our current package-installation process:

1) dpkg takes a lot of time to start.
2) dpkg takes a lot of time recursing down the directory tree to install
a few packages only.
3) there's no way to do unattended installations.

but luckily, there are a few answers too:

1) dpkg uses plain text databases. It takes a lot of time to parse them
to build its internal tables. IIRC, "dpkg-next-generation" (the one that
is being actively developed, and probably will be in slink RSN) doesn't
use the text databases directly, it uses hash tables to speed the
process.

2) dselect methods are the ones that call dpkg with the "recursive"
option. If you use one of the "new" methods (dpkg-mountable, apt, ...)
you will find they don't do "recursive" installs anymore. You won't have
wait for hours while a list of "Skipping foo. Skipping bar." is displayed
at the screen.

3) Now that is a big problem. And one that has been discussed frequently.
I can't remember what was the final decision (if any) that came out of
the last thread, but you may find it at debian-dpkg or debian-admintool
maillists archives.

	Thanks,
--
Enrique Zanardi						   ezanardi@ull.es


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