Another woody to sarge upgrade report

[James Strandboge <jamie@tpptraining.com>]

Hi,

I am the maintainer of the gnome2.2 backport for woody, and in working
on the transition of the backport to sarge I ran into the problem with
'apt' on woody where packages get configured in the wrong order (because
of how it deals with long lines) and therefore dist-upgrade failed with
errors.  See bugs 263546 and 263545 for a discussion (though non-gnome
packages like tetex-bin were also affected).

In short, to get the dist-upgrade to work without error, I did (thanks
J.H.M Dassen (Ray)):

1. Upgrade to apt in sarge

2. add to /etc/apt/apt.conf:
Dpkg
{
        MaxArgBytes "31000";
}

3. apt-get -u dist-upgrade

After doing the above, the upgrade went without a hitch (gnome2.2 users
that are reading this need to wait a few days before attempting this as
I haven't uploaded some package updates that are needed for a smooth
upgrade).

IMHO, something along the lines of the above should be in the Release
Notes for Sarge.  I would imagine that this would affect a lot of woody
users who have many packages installed.  From the apt changelog:

  * Options Dpkg::MaxArgs,Dpkg::MaxArgBytes to allow a much longer dpkg
    command line.

Thanks,

Jamie

PS-- please CC me as I am not subscribed to this list.

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