Re: woody upgrade fails horribly
On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> If you didn't do this, many things break on install. These breakages are
> not the fault of the packages that get involved, but the fault of an old,
> incapable apt-get. The newest version works much better.
No, most of the breakages are due to packages. Keep in mind that the 'old
incapable apt-get' was the one used to install potato, which is more
capable that the one that installed slink, which is more capable than the
one that installed hamm, etc.
Back in the bad old days the complexity of what maintainers could do was
severly limited by dselect/dpkg's capabilities. Since then we have seen a
steady rise in the size and complexity of the dependency graph. Each
release someone has started using something weird in important packages
which effectively mandates a newer APT which has been tweaked to better
support that particular weird situation.
So, yes, the new apt is better at supporting some odd features that have
never been widely used until now, but the only reason it is necessary is
because people insist on using them, and are not trying to remain
compatible with the software in potato.
Aside from that, there are definately some buggy lowlevel packages that
wreck the upgrade cycle, there always are, these issues can only be found
with lots of upgrade testing.
Jason
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