potato install report
Today I have installed potato from scratch, using boot-floppies 2.2.4.
I have made a list of annoying things:
* There exists a perl-base package which is fake and essential.
Is this really needed? essential packages should not proliferate,
because some day we will want to get rid of them and we will not
be able to do it.
If desired, I could make base-files to depend on perl5-base, as
it is already done with awk.
* perl-5.005 recommends a specific version of the -doc package.
(i.e. using "="). This is extremely annoying.
I strongly suggest to make perl-doc a virtual package and Recommend
that instead (in case there are perl 5004-doc and perl 5004-doc). Even a
recommend is too strong, a Suggests would be much better.
* There is an export LANG=C appended to /root/.bashrc.
But /usr/share/base-files/dot.bashrc does not have any LANG= line.
This is a leftover of an workaround for an important bug in slink's
dpkg, but should be already fixed in potato, so the boot floppies
should not modify /root/.bashrc anymore.
* console-tools asks about the layout of my keyboard. Would be nice
that the installation program remembers that since it is the very
first thing it asks about. I guess this is something to be solved by
debconf.
* apt default configuration for non-US should read non-US/main etc.
(I've not tested 2.2.5 floppies, maybe this is already fixed).
* gnuplot should not ask about its suid-ness by default.
(I'm using the default level of questions in debconf. I guess this
should be solved by modifying the priority of the question).
* lynx still has non-bright red and non-bright blue. This is
almost unreadable. This was already reported a long time ago
but it has not been fixed yet. Has the maintainer tried this colors on
console?
* nfs-kernel-server and nfs-server are both standard but conflict at each
other. This is grave because they are both standard, but there should be
a lot more of conflicts between optional packages which nobody has
checked so far and are against policy now that it has been clarified.
I will appreciate that someone takes Manoj's pkg-order and start making
reports to make potato conflict-free among optional packages.
* The "mv" command from busybox (I think this is how it's called) does not
work properly. I'm used to install Debian from scratch over my
previous installation, by switching to the 2nd virtual console and
doing cd /target; mkdir OLD; mv * OLD. This now results in a complete
mess. [ Fortunately I had /home in a different partition ].
I will report a bug for every of this in the next days, unless somebody
tells me they are fixed, but there is a bad thing here: not every of this
deserves a "Severity: important" bug. This means we may well release
the distribution again having a considerable number of ugly bugs.
Am I the only who thinks we need a new severity: ugly to prevent this?
Thanks.
--
"e0d27b1f10fc8ed78e4bd0c266269907" (a truly random sig)
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-testing-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: