Re: [OT] Upgrade madness (Was: Re: Do developers tend to run unstable?)
On Wed, Nov 08, 2000 at 08:57:09PM -0800, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
[snip]
> I have a cron job to do
> apt-get update && apt-get --yes --download-only dist-upgrade
> nightly. It spares me much of the pain of watching downloads run, even
> though DSL mitigates that somewhat. I do check in to see if anything
> has broken before actually doing a real dist-upgrade, though.
> Most of the things I'm interested in working on don't have big impacts
> on the usability of the system, so I'm not a front-line bughunter.
[snip]
Actually, I've only ever run "apt-get dist-upgrade" once, and not on my
machine. And I don't recall ever actually running "apt-get upgrade". After
barely surviving the infamous potato libc6/bash breakage, and then the
perl breakage, I *always* run apt-get in no-action mode:
apt-get -s upgrade | grep -v Conf
This nicely lists the packages that would be upgraded (the grep is to
remove duplicate mentions of the packages from the Conf lines). I would
then look over the list to see if anything important (libc, bash, perl,
etc.) would be upgraded, and manually apt-get install them, baby-sitting
the upgrade of those important packages if needed. Even when nothing
important is being upgraded, I usually find that I don't want to run
apt-get upgrade directly, because I *don't* want to upgrade some packages.
And I'm glad I was this cautious, too, because recently, there was some
versioning breakage with kernel-image-2.2.17, and I happen to be using a
custom-built kernel. If I had blindly run apt-get upgrade (or worse,
dist-upgrade), it could have hosed my kernel installation (*shudder*).
As for watching the downloads run... I usually run it in a separate xterm,
and iconify it as it downloads. Occasionally, I do something like "apt-get
install ... && echo \\007" to get it to beep me when it's done. :-)
T
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