Re: Bug#864043: release-notes: proofreading sweep - moreinfo.dbk
[Resend - sorry, I thought mail to #864043 would go to the list]
Niels Thykier wrote:
>> Meanwhile, my test upgrades so far (multiple trials on two different
>> machines) have consistently run into a couple of nasty undocumented
>> glitches - the upgrade disables my network connection (a restart of
>> networking.service that errors out), and the new version of X doesn't
>> respond to input devices until I install xserver-xorg-input-libinput.
>> I was hoping to find some mention of these issues in pending bug
>> reports, but it doesn't look like it.
>
> Have both of these issues been adequately documented by now? They sound
> like the kind of issues that ought to be documented (assuming they are a
> general problem).
Sorry, no. This dist-upgrade has been the trickiest I've seen for a
decade or so, and most of the glitches aren't really documented.
#1) X starts needing xserver-xorg-input-libinput, which will be pulled
in by default if you've got xserver-xorg-input-all installed, but not
otherwise (symptoms: input stops working). There's a new item about
libinput, but it basically fails to address this issue.
#2) independently, startx stops working with similar symptoms, but
nothing I've found makes it work again, regardless of what else I
install (in particular, xserver-xorg-legacy makes no difference).
The only solution I've found is to switch to lightdm (which might as
well happen before the dist-upgrade). If nobody else is seeing this
then I don't even know what to report a bug against.
#3) after an upgrade, ifupdown is marked as automatically installed
and no longer held in by dependencies, so things like aptitude want
to uninstall it as junk. Fortunately I'd noticed this was likely to
happen before I started doing upgrades, so I've never had my network
crippled by this. I suggested some text about this in
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=864166#57
#4) at the end of the dist-upgrade needrestart restarts networking,
which fails - the wifi interface gives errors as if I'd defined two
gateway addresses. You can tell needrestart not to do this, but
fortunately it's fixed by a reboot, and a reboot was the next step
in the dist-upgrade anyway. However, it's easy to imagine ways this
could combine with the other items on this list to be a real problem.
I can't reproduce the issue outside the context of a dist-upgrade, so
again I don't know where the bug is exactly, and if nobody else is
seeing it then I don't know if it warrants being mentioned in the
release-notes.
It's possible that #2 amd #4 only hit me because I'm doing my trial
upgrades on an old machine, and I'm not using a mainstream desktop
environment (just fvwm). But I haven't heard anybody claiming to have
done any bug-free upgrades, so it's hard to be confident.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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