[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Shall Debian's su conform to other implementations



Loudly promoting my own software here...

la, 2005-11-12 kello 10:39 -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh kirjoitti:
> On Sat, 12 Nov 2005, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > > Besides, depends/pre-depends and conflicts should be more than enough if
> > > done right.
> > 
> > Yes, this is what is meant by supporting partial upgrades.  "Supporting
> 
> Ah, ok.  THAT is what I meant too, in a roundabout way.  So we're in
> agreement.
> 
> > partial upgrades" doesn't mean "any given package should be upgradable on
> > its own without upgrading any others"; it means "no apt-get install command
> > should be able to break the system".
> 
> Too bad this isn't really true, it is usually a bad idea to mix
> oldstable+stable for more time than what is strictly necessary to upgrade
> the entire system to stable. Not all dependencies are always correctly
> expressed as versioned dependencies metadata.  So you can get breakages that
> the maintainers don't know about and would never test for explicitly.
> 
> The people doing backports actually help a LOT to track down these bugs as
> they happen :-)

Another that developers can do is this:

    sudo piuparts -d sarge -d etch -d sid -al foo.log foo

where foo is the name of their package. This needs a fairly fast access
to a mirror, however, but that can be somewhat avoided by creating a
chroot snapshot (see options -b and -s).

I'm running this on all packages in sid, and filing bugs about any
problems I find, but it does take time and it would be preferable that
package maintainers who can do it themselves do so.

Of course, what piuparts tests is not a complete test of all the
functionality of the package, only that the basics of installation,
upgrade, and removal work. Wait for version 2, please. :)

-- 
Fundamental truth #4: Typing URLs always introduces errors. Always copy
+paste.



Reply to: