Bug#608704: closed by Simon Paillard <spaillard@debian.org> (Re: Bug#608704: release-notes: recommend to close any running X server?)
On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 07:42:00AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 10:06:12AM +0100, Holger Wansing wrote:
> > owner@bugs.debian.org (Debian Bug Tracking System) wrote:
> > > This is an automatic notification regarding your Bug report
> > > which was filed against the release-notes package:
>
> > > #608704: release-notes: recommend to close any running X server?
>
> > > It has been closed by Simon Paillard <spaillard@debian.org>.
>
> > Simon Paillard <spaillard@debian.org> wrote:
> > > > I want to ask, if it would make sense to advice the user, to
> > > > close any running X server when doing an dist-upgrade.
>
> > > Actually already advised:
> > > http://www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.fr.html#upgrade-preparations
>
> > No, that's not correct.
> > The release-notes recommend to not _use_ the x server for upgrade,
> > but you can have an x server running.
> > It is not recommended to shutdown any running x servers on the
> > machine!
> > That's not the same.
> > And that's what I asked for.
>
> > Shall I reopen?
>
> Why do you want users to shut down their X server during the upgrade? I
> don't think this is a sound recommendation. Even recommending to not run
> the upgrade under X is, IMHO and IME, a paranoid recommendation that we
> include only for the benefit of a very small number of users who might be
> impacted. gdm certainly doesn't break running X sessions when upgraded.
I find gdm crashing even when there's no upgrade going on. When a
session ends, it seems unable to put up a new login screen. When that
happens, it has also disabled the functions keys that would take you to
an exiting plain-text terminal session (such as ctl-alt-F1). The
machine has effectively become unusable.
There's been a bug logged against gdm anout this; it seems to have been
caused by an error in a script (wrong file name for accessing gdm) and
fixed. The gdm I have in my squeeze is more recent than this fix,
but the problem still persists on my system. It has made it suficiently
unusable that I'm now booting lenny from another partition just to get
work done.
I can well understand the fear that this might happen on an upgrade.
But I suspect the solution is to make sure that gdm is really fixed, so
that only the paranoid need shut down X. Failing that, a warning in the
release notes might still be useful.
-- hendrik
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