Re: Misconfigured bookworm upgrades
On 28/2/25 11:57, Colin Watson wrote:
Ian Fleming wrote: "Once is happenstance.  Twice is coincidence.  The 
third time it's enemy action."  I've only got as far as coincidence so 
far, but it's still enough to make me wonder.
No need to turn to paranoia in this case :)
[snip]
This is clearly (to my mind) a misconfiguration,
INDEED.  And maybe a (minor) documentation bug, given that Debian 
installer would never enable *only* security updates....
My (humble) opinion reasoning on this is:   some admin, probably coming 
from other environments/distros, understood that enabling ONLY security 
updates would provide all the stability guarantees they want --- i.e. no 
incompatible upgrades during the lifecycle of the release.
so I've rejected them as bugs on openssh: we don't support installing 
only security updates and never upgrading to packages from new point 
releases, because those aren't rigorously separate streams: security 
updates are built against the stable suite and so may pick up 
versioned dependencies against it.  But seeing two users who seem to 
have their systems configured this way makes me wonder what's going 
on.  Does anyone know of documentation somewhere that recommends 
configuring stable systems this way?
Not in Debian, that I know of .... but I can easily understand where the 
reasoning that led to this misconfiguration came from; I have actually 
seem them live :)
Humble suggestion to add an (overrideable) warning to APT to this 
effect?  Something along the lines of "W: Configuring only security 
updates for suite $suite is not officially supported, and can create 
installability conflicts"
    Stressing the "officially" here: it can work; will usually work.... 
until it doesn't (like for these bugs). But it's not the maintainer's fault.
Just my .02€. HTH
--
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time alloted to it.
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