Re: Disabling automatic upgrades on Sid by default?
On Sun, 2020-12-27 at 06:01 +0000, M. Zhou wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I don't quite understand the meaning of automatic upgrades on a
> rolling
> system such as Debian/Sid. According to my own experience, such
> automatic upgrades could be dangerous.
>
> Recently package ppp is pending for upgrade but it does not co-exist
> with my currently installed network-manager. Today when I was
> shutting
> down my machine, Gnome automatically checked the "install updates
> ..."
> box for me before I realized its existence. As a result, the system
> reboots and installed ppp by force, removing network-manager and
> break
> my system for daily use as I need network-manager for wifi-access.
>
> I've been a daily Sid user for at least 4 years. Automatic upgrades
> are
> to blame for nearly all my system troubles. And I feel very
> disappointed every time linux behaves like M$ windows.
>
> So, do we have a consensus on whether automatic upgrades should be
> enabled by default?
>
This has not happened simply due to automatic upgrades, it has happened
because your system, automatically or otherwise, performed a dist-
upgrade/full-upgrade rather than a "normal"/"simple"/"basic" upgrade,
and so rather than holding back the ppp upgrade in the face of the
conflict, it proceeded with the conflict-resolution solution of
removing network-manager in order to upgrade ppp. You would not have
encountered the problem with just a "normal" upgrade.
This conflict arose of course due to the new ppp package being marked
as compatible only with a new network-manager version, and it being
published on unstable a day or so before the new and compatible
network-manager package was, which unfortunately is a type of situation
that occurs from time to time on sid, sometimes taking several days to
get sorted out.
Allowing your system to automatically perform a full/dist upgrade on
sid is a very unwise thing to do precisely because problems like this
are to be expected. (Apt/aptitude does not understand that the conflict
is just temporary, requiring a few days of patience waiting for further
updates to become available for other packages, and thus full/dist
upgrading suggests removing stuff to fix conflicts).
I use sid/unstable myself. I have unattended-upgrades installed though
I typically manually install upgrades anyway. When I performed a
"normal" upgrade the other day, the ppp package upgrade was correctly
blocked (held back), and only became unblocked once the compatible
updated network-manager package became available a day or so later.
Having noticed something was blocked though, since occasionally manual
action is required to fix an actual problem, I asked aptitude/apt-get
to try a full-upgrade such that I could see what was held back; this
showed me the conflict, and I wisely chose not to proceed with the
proposed solution of removing network-manager, understanding the
situation for what it was from past experience. I thus did not have the
unfortunate experience of loosing network-manager like you did.
You need to investigate why your system is running a dist/full upgrade
rather than a normal one and configure it not to do so. You will thus
have a better experience.
You might also have a better experience on 'testing' rather than sid,
however the problem with using 'testing' is that security upgrades can
sometimes be significantly delayed, which is why I personally avoid it.
Paul Wise mentioned a solution to this in his response which is
interesting, though I'm not certain I'm confident enough in its
reliability to make use of it myself.
Some people responding to this thread do not seem to understand that
sid/unstable is **not** an actual "rolling" distro. I would love Debian
to properly and officially offer an actual "rolling" distro alongside
the stable one, since many like myself use unstable as though it was
and love/trust Debian too much to move to something else, however
unstable/sid along with testing and experimental are all simply
different "staging" areas for the preparation of the next (major)
stable Debian release. Unstable & testing not being an actual "rolling"
distros means that we cannot expect to have quite the same expectations
as for an actual "rolling" distro.
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