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Re: 1.2 Upgrade Experience



gavin@treecave.org wrote:
> I've just completed an upgrade to Debian 1.2, and would like to
> relate some details of the experience in the hopes that it might
> help others who get stuck as I did.  I also have some suggestions
> for the maintainers at the end of this message.  But before I get
> to any of that, I want to say "thanks".

I just did the same last night and I'd have to say ditto!  The
upgrade went pretty well and "thanks"!
 
> [...]
> 
> While upgrading, a number of packages (about 10 of the over 100)
> failed to install.  The result of this was that after the first
> round of attempted installations of the new/updated packages, the
> ftp access method for dselect no longer worked.

I had similar problems, but dpkg-ftp wasnt working properly.  For
me it was just a matter of re-running the configure process
(dpkg --configure --pending) until things started working again.
 
> I really didn't want to restore from backup, and start over again,
> so I took a shot at using the "mounted" access method to access
> the package files that the "ftp" method had just downloaded.  A
> little "find"-ing found the .deb files in
> 
>  /var/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp/debian/Debian-1.2/binary-i386/...,

You could have just used dpkg directly with dpkg --install *.deb :)
 
> [...]

> The following is some suggestions for the Debian maintainers.
> 
> In the above I would have liked to be more specific about what failed
> and how, but I did not keep a written log, and apparently dselect didn't
> either.  I'd like to suggest that dselect keep a transcript of what
> it attempts to do and whatever messages that attempt produces.
> 
> I noted that many packages printed warning messages and advice as
> they were installed or configured.  This works fine when your just
> upgrading a single package, but when your upgrading 100 or so packages,
> these messages just scroll off the screen never to be seen again.  The
> aforementioned transcript would help here too, but I'd rather see such
> advice and recommendations put into a readme.debian file in a
> /use/doc/packageX/.... file so it can be reread later easily.

What would really be nice is a transcript log that could be played
back through dselect to reproduce the same results.  OS/2 had
a feature similar to that which would allow you to install one
machine and then reproduce the same system on other machines by
using the transcript log.

-- 
Bernard Leach                    Australian Business Access Pty Ltd.
leachbj@aba.net.au               http://www.aba.net.au/


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