Re: A case study of a new user turned off debian
Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> I finally convinced a sysadmin friend of mine that Debian was the way and the
> light. He started a new job and showed up on his first day to set up his
> machine by installing Debian. In short, things went horribly wrong and he
> started this new job by wasting two days picking up the pieces. He's now very
> leery of suggesting using Debian on other machines at work or of using it
> himself at home.
>
> What started the chain of events was that a fairly routine minor bug bit the
> latest libc6 release. He's an experienced sysadmin though and wasn't the least
> bit fazed by that. What drove him batty was that it was so hard to recover
> from the mess and all the obvious avenues just made the problem worse.
So he starts out on his first day of work trying out Debian for the
very first time and uses unstbale? No pitty there then.
> All he had to do was install an older version of libc6 and every other package
> would have been happy. All the infrastructure is there to do this, the old
> packages are all on the ftp/http sites, the package may even be sitting in
> apt's cache. But there's no interface for it.
apt-get libc6=version
> The only interface for rolling back is switching the entire machine to an
> earlier distribution and telling apt to try to downgrade -- which is unlikely
> to work. And worse, every time you run apt it only downloads and unpacks
> *more* packages, all of which, of course, fail as well.
snapshot.debian.net just rocks for previous versions.
> What would be really neat would be if aptitude or perhaps even apt checked for
> earlier versions of the package in the pool and offered them as options if the
> current one fails to configure.
There never are any previous versions in the pool of ftp.debian.org.
The old version is removed when the new one enters.
And debs in the cache are easily installed with dpkg if need be.
MfG
Goswin
Reply to: