Upgrade report.
Hello.
Yesterday I have upgraded my 20-computer lab to woody.
This was not a FAI-like "completely automated upgrade" but I used
several tricks to make things easier.
I used a local mini-distribution to make /var/lib/dpkg/available much
smaller and reduce dpkg's load.
Since every time I tried to upgrade using "apt-get upgrade" or
"apt-get dist-upgrade", apt wanted to remove a lot of important
packages (not in the package priority sense), I decided to use dselect
this time. I first selected the packages in one computer, and then
copied them to the others by using dpkg --get-selections/--set-selections.
(These selections included also deselections of packages I knew they
would be no longer required after the upgrade, like oldlibs, fake
packages and such).
The upgrade was done by using ssh as root and a lot of virtual consoles.
I first started the upgrade in four computers, but at some point very
early in the upgrade dpkg segfaulted. Since, at the same time, I wanted
perl to be quiet about locales I tried again with LANG=C and this time
dpkg did not segfault, so I strongly discourage not using LANG=C for
upgrades from potato...
I had to answer a lot of questions, but I deserve it for not
increasing debconf priority level first... After I fixed the dpkg segfault
problem I started the upgrade in 6 more computers, so after 1h 40min
approximately, the upgrade was complete in half of the lab.
Then I had a class and some of my students realized xterms changed to
white letters over a black background. Apparently this is everything
they noticed, so I considered the upgrade a success so far :-)
After the class, for the remaining 10 computers, I copied config.dat
and templates.dat in /var/cache/debconf to the not-yet-upgraded computers
and this time the upgrade went more quickly, 1 hour approximately.
(The computers were Pentium/150 with 32M RAM). I don't know whether
copying these files to not-yet-upgraded computers is a documented
procedure but maybe it should be, since it works great.
During the upgrade I discovered how evil and annoying dpkg's conffile
mechanism may be. We should really deprecate a lot of conffiles in
favour of configuration files outside the .deb which are created by
the postinst when they do not exist. According to policy, this is what
should be done when there is not a default which satisfies everybody
(for example, /etc/yp.conf).
Anyway, the upgrade was smoother than I expected, so I'm very glad
that it went so well.
Thanks everybody.
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