Re: woody upgrade fails horribly
On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>
> 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
Well, don't say this to Branden ;-)
And my experience is that without upgrading apt/dpkg lots breaks. If you
start with upgrading those packages (and maybe apt-utils) you get a much
cleaner upgrade.
> 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.
And why should they in woody? I'll have to take your word for the techical
aspects of apt, but my experience says that the upgrade is satisfactory
with the new apt, and horribly broken without.
Now, to clarify, my potato system was a "simple" install with lots of sgml
and tetex stuff, a local X install, and a small hadfull of my faves.
As always, YMMV, and testing is the right place to report failures before
filing bug reports. The more who try it out, the quicker we can come to
closure.
>
> 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.
I'm not sure what you mean by "lowlevel packages", but I thank you for
encouraging more testing. We can never have too much of that, no matter
what others may say ;-)
Luck,
Dwarf
--
_-_-_-_-_- Author of "Dwarf's Guide to Debian GNU/Linux" _-_-_-_-_-_-
_- _-
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