Problems with 1.2.1
ok, I installed Debian for the first time about 3 weeks ago (1.2), I've
been running Linux for a few years and have previously installed slackware and
two versions of red-hat. All in all I'm very pleased with Debian (and I am especially attracted by debian's general design philosophies), however I'm a little surprised at the state of what are called "stable" releases.
Now, my hard-drive collapsed a few days ago, so I've had the please of
doing a fresh install of 1.2.1. Unfortunately I had the ncftp problem another
person struck a few days ago, that is I used ncftp to get the distribution and ncftp seems not to like symlinks in its recursive mode, therefore I downloaded all of rex then downloaded rex-updates and moved the updates into the rex tree (along with the packages.gz file from rex-fixed). Its possible that this butchery has been reflected in some (but not all) of the problems listed below.
List of problems:
- DOSEMU suggest fdos but cannot find it.
- xemeraldia, angband, dungeon and mikmod expected a libc5 greater than the one I apparently had (>=5.4.17-1 I think)
- xbmbrowser suggests pbmplus , which it cant find (I suspect it should suggest netpbm).
- man2html suggests ncsa (shouldn't it suggest any type of WWW server?)
- Imagemagik (and several other programs) suggests zlib >1.03-1, I think this was an error in the last update of zlib which was released as 1.0.4-4 rather than 1.04-4??
- Seyon suggests kermit (not sure if this is a bug, but I've used Seyon for a few years and didn't notice that it needed kermit?)
- In setting up gnuchess-book, got a "no package named 'gnuchess-book' is installed, cannot configure"
- xringd setup failed as (apparently) /dev/modem hadn't been installed (and indeed wasn't installed in setting up at all and had to be done by hand)
- smartlist install warnings, seems it tries to to do install stuff before smail is installed/setup (dint find /etc/aliases and newaliases - does smail even supply newaliases [I know sendmail does, I don't know much about smail])
- xbase gave a warning message that /usr/lib/X11 was moved to /usr/lib/X11.old, after installation I find app-defaults in /usr/lib/X11.old with a couple of default files in there but the rest in /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults
- mgetty-fax tried to install before netpbm, failed.
- smartlist setup failed , no group root.list and no user list. no apparent mesg warning beforehand that these were required.
- /usr/X11R6/lib still not in /etc/ld.so.conf!? (this is the most surprising considering the amount of exposure this problem had, perhaps this was due to my butchered method of acquiring the 1.2.1 tree?)
- man2html setup, tried to setup manglimpse before glimpse set up.
- TeX install failed coz of failure of texbin (due to MakeTeXPK fail, due to ld.so.conf problem perhaps?), this produced so many errors that the entire
install process puked at this point.
- cnews, install completed failed (seems dpkg --install couldn't do it either).
- cron still seems to be broken (once again possibly my download method of 1.2.1 here).
- Had lots of probs with tk* stuff, with tk-dev clashing with the different tk* releases.
- It seems that none of the non-free stuff installed (and possibly contrib as well, have not checked yet), had this same problem with 1.2, had to install some stuff like netpbm by hand to get the binary-i386 stuff to install correctly. Note that all the non-free stuff was available for selection!
Ok and a couple of pedantic notes:
- net-acct setup spelling error (/usr/dec/examples/net-acct/ should (I assume) be /usr/doc/examples/net-acct/)
- Spelling mistake in one-line description of signify.
Now these are just problems with setup, I expect I will find more problems (such as incorrect setup of apache tree) as I begin to use the system.
I suggest that 1.2 should not have been used as a recent stable version to release to CD cutters, and that people who had not used Linux/Unix before AND had no access to the mailing list would have little chance of overcoming the installation problems. It seems that 1.2.1 may not be much better (allowing for my stupidity being minimal rather than gross [which is a possibility ;) ] )
I don't think it does much for Debian's public image to tout instability as stability (perhaps we need a very-unstable, unstable and mostly-stable system, aiming eventually for a stable release also <smile>).
Despite the above rantings, I think Debian is a very good system, most of these problems appear to be down to the very ambitious packaging system, one which blows away any other Unix's packaging system. Most of the above problems are able to be easily overcome by a moderately knowledgeable user. I compare this to the last redhat release, which had problems which were far beyond my fixing, and thus left me having to wait for redhat released upgrades (one of several reasons I switched to Debian).
I think an organised team of testers needs to be put in place, preferably with links fat enough to handle testing completely fresh installs (unfortunately I don't fit this, I have a 28.8 permanent link, shared with others, but I'm happy to test incremental upgrades).
Richard Jones
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