Re: dpkg BUG install order problem & suggestion to add...

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

John D. Hendrickson and Sara Darnell wrote:

> I've always had problems especially during upgrade (last was sarge
> to sqeeze) and wished to help.

Thanks for the offer of help.  There are always problems with upgrades
"skipping a few releases" like this, since package maintainers do not
tend to think about or test upgrade paths other than Debian N ->
N+1.  In particular, often there will be a package or two that assumes
packages have already been upgraded to the version from the previous
release without declaring specific dependencies in that vein.

So the usual advice is to upgrade one release at a time:

 sarge ->
  etch ->
  lenny ->
  squeeze

Of course if there is some simple way to allow shortcuts (e.g., some
tool to perform multiple upgrades after a person types a single
command?) then that could be very interesting.

For clarity, could you give an example of problems you ran into?
I.e., what command did you run, and what bad behavior resulted?

[...]
> My suggestion is NOT to replace what is there but to add a method.
> The method checks the final install decisions.  It easily shows what
> order they should be done in AND whether they go out of bounds.

Perhaps you are looking into changing the upgrade order to avoid
running into temporary conflicts and other dependency problems?  If so,
yes, that sounds very welcome, though it probably has more to do with
higher-level tools like apt, aptitude, and cupt than dpkg (and alas,
it wouldn't be enough to address the problem described above).

> I have a working example of what to do that mostly uses existing
> unix tools.

Well, what are you waiting for? :)

Thanks for writing, and good luck.
Jonathan