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Re: Gnome totally broke



On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 02:37:38PM -0500, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> Personally I think a distribution/version between stable and testing
> which was based on testing but the packaging was complete in as such no
> dependencies were broken on any package would/could be a popular
> distribution. 

testing already tries to do this, and it can't really be done any better.
The problems come in when either (a) the dependencies aren't correctly
specified in the .deb, and this doesn't get noticed by anyone and no bugs
get filed until it's too late, or (b) packages dependencies change so
that two packages that used to work together no longer do (or the update
of one of the other is held up), or (c) packages get outright removed
(which doesn't break the dependencies in the distribution itself, but
can confuse people trying to do installs).

None of these things happen by the time we make a release, but they do
still happen in testing. Worse things happen in unstable (all of the
above, as well as packages depending on things that haven't been uploaded
yet (X 4.0.3 betas, eg) or packages that'll never be uploaded (Ximian
Gnome, eg)), but people are more used to it, probably not least because
it happens more regulary and generally on a smaller scale when it does.

> There seems to be a great difference between software in Potato and
> software in Woody. Just a simple glance at packages of wine and alsa*
> reveal tremendous differences. 

Well, woody/sid have had 15 months of development, by one measure. That's
a lot of time in free software...

There's still a fair few difference between woody and sid too; many
of these are holdovers from the initial rollout of testing and getting
rid of some of these causes problems, since there's a huge pile of them
that all have to happen at once. X4, debconf, perl5.6, gnome 1.2/1.4
and KDE were all essentially due to the initial testing roll out. (There
were other things that could've been done to roll out testing, they all
would've been worse, though, really)

> > One of the things that'd be *really* helpful is logs of the upgrades. If
> > you're using apt-get at the commandline, then it's trivially easy to
> > get good logs: just run "script" first. [...]
> I did my upgrades from apt-get. I am on a PC at work. What are you
> referring to here as "script". Is this a commandline option for apt-get?

Here's an example of me logging my attempt to say "echo hi":

	[aj@blae ~]$ script
	Script started, file is typescript
	[aj@blae ~]$ echo hi
	hi
	[aj@blae ~]$ exit
	Script done, file is typescript

it logs every character that appears. So ./typescript after the above
looks like:

	[aj@blae ~]$ cat typescript 
	Script started on Wed Apr 25 17:03:09 2001
	[aj@blae ~]$ echo hi
	hi
	[aj@blae ~]$ exit

	Script done on Wed Apr 25 17:03:11 2001

When using apt-get, you'll get all sorts of messy stuff related to the
percentage counting, but that's okay.

> What I know in the process I took over several complete reinstalls on a
> clean drive is this, dist-upgrade to Woody left me with an unusable
> system due to dependencies not met. Or should I say Gnome/X11 were in a
> state of disrepair.

The more precise the better. It's not clear what happened in the above;
did you let apt remove packages that you didn't want removed that broke
gnome for you? Or did apt come up with a reasonable upgrade without
removing packages that then didn't work after it all got installed? That
sort of information is pretty important as far as fixing whatever went
wrong goes.

apt doesn't really let you have any unmet dependencies on your system,
so it's unlikely that that's the real explanation for your system being
unusable. There would've had to have been some other step inbetween.

> I would rather be a positive contributor than a negative detractor. I'll
> be a good guy and go read the bug page. Is there any other documentation
> on how I can provide usefull data when something fails?

There *ought* to be, and there *used* to be... Dunno if there is any
nowadays though. Using script is probably a good start.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
  do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
                      -- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)



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