Re: Woody->Sarge upgrade report [long, but very important]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Hello Rob,
On Monday 22 November 2004 23:19, Rob Bradford wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 12:52:25PM +0100, Frans Pop wrote:
> > Steps
> > =====
> > 1. Install Woody's aptitude
> >
> > ==> This is not described correctly in Release Notes.
>
> (CC'ing you since i'm not sure if you're on the list)
Thanks for doing so, as I am not on debian-release.
> The release notes have yet to be published, where did you get this from? Did you
> build them from CVS? If so i'm very concerned.
I based my installation on the version from CVS that I also used for the
translation to Dutch. This is not quite the latest, but AFAICT there have
been no significant changes in the relevant part.
In my view the current release notes for Sarge are very confusing as to which
version of Aptitude it wants the user to use for upgrading.
Below is the relevant section of the Sarge Release Notes, with some comments.
Cheers,
Frans
<sect id="upgradingpackages"><heading>Upgrading packages</heading>
<p>The recommended tool for upgrading between &debian; releases is
to use the package management tool <prgn>aptitude</prgn>. This tool
makes safer decisions about package installations than running
<prgn>apt-get</prgn> directly.</p>
<p>Don't forget to mount all needed partitions (notably the root
and <file>/usr</file> partitions) read-write, with a command
like:
<example>
mount -o remount,rw /<var>mountpoint</var>
</example></p>
<p>Next ensure that the APT source entries (in
<file>/etc/apt/sources.list</file>) refer to the <tt>'stable'</tt>
distribution and does not refer to it by its codename (e.g.
<tt>&oldreleasename;</tt>).
[paras about typescript deleted as they are irrelevant for this discussion]
<p>Next the <package>aptitude</package> package needs to be installed.
This is done with:</p>
Here's where the confusion starts.
We've already told the user to make sure his sources.list point to the "new"
stable for Sarge. So what will be installed here: the Woody version or the
Sarge version? What do we want?
If we want the Sarge version, maybe this should be changed to:
<p>Next the <package>aptitude</package> package needs to be installed
or upgraded. This is done with:</p>
Also, if we want the Sarge version, there is a step missing here. Before
apt-get install is any use, the user should _first_ run 'apt-get update' to
actually get the new version of aptitude.
(Note that 'aptitude update' can not be used at this point as it will fail;
see my report and the comments further down.)
If not, apt-get will just say "aptitude already at latest version" or it will
try to install Woody's version of aptitude (which could well fail as I would guess
that version will no longer be available in Sarge's 'stable' archives).
<p><example>
apt-get install aptitude
</example></p>
As noted in my upgrade report, this will _not_ upgrade the basic package
management tools.
So, if we want the Sarge versions installed here, 'apt-get install dpkg aptitude'
should be used in order to have these upgraded as well.
<p>Provided that you have a working APT configuration as described
above this will install the &oldreleasename; version of
<prgn>aptitude</prgn>.</p>
Ah. This is what really confused me! Here is the actual text that says Woody's
version should be installed at this point.
This is not even possible if the user for some reason had already run
'apt-get update' before starting the upgrade procedure!
If we really want the user to install the _old_ aptitude, we should make sure
his sources.list is explicitly pointed to Woody.
But why not have the Sarge version installed at this point? Seems much more
logical to me.
<p>First <prgn>aptitude</prgn> needs to fetch a list of new and
updated packages for the new release. This is done by executing:</p>
<p><example>
aptitude update
</example></p>
As shown in my upgrade report, this command will fail if the version of aptitude
that is installed really is the version from Woody! If this is what we want, we
should tell the user to use 'apt-get update' here.
If Sarge's aptitude is already installed and we have already done 'apt-get update',
I think it is not neccecary to run aptitude update again here.
<p>Once <prgn>aptitude</prgn> has information on all the available
packages the system is almost ready to be fully upgraded.</p>
<p><example>
aptitude -f --with-suggests --with-recommends dist-upgrade
</example></p>
Maybe it would be better to drop the '--with-suggests' here. This can pull in
a lot of unwanted packages on which the 'suggested' packages depend. I know it
could even pull in the whole X system on a system that had no X previously!
See also the comments from Daniel Burrows in his reply to my report.
<p>This will perform a complete upgrade of the system, i.e. install
the newest available versions of all packages, and resolve all
possible dependency changes between packages in different releases.
If necessary, it will install some new packages (usually new library
versions, or renamed packages), and remove any conflicting obsoleted
packages (such as <package>console-tools-libs</package>).</p>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFBonJegm/Kwh6ICoQRAm45AJ9PvVdTicG98cTYxqjmCwThoaKhFwCeOdDG
8AcFbzc5sGQp4tCNRiBo6kw=
=BKJp
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Reply to: