Debian-2.0-beta upgrade: my experience (after the 1st time)
I now have a total of 4 Linux machines running Debian-2.0-beta
(including one DEC-Alpha running the current hamm tree). Except for
the DEC-Alpha, all of these machines were upgraded from 1.3.1r6.
After my bad experience with the first upgrade, I wanted to state how
my subsequent upgrades have been.
Recall that my first upgrade was a disaster (see previous post). The
libc5-2-libc6 mini howto went well and the system was stable at that
point. However, the wholesale upgrade of packages via dselect did not
work and crashed my system. I eventually was able to recover, but
this should not have happened. I recommend to the developers (if they
have not already done so) to try an upgrade like this and get it to
work.
I tried a different route with the subsequent upgrades that proved
successful. After I performed the libc5-to-libc6 via the mini-howto
(incidently I had to add several more package upgrades during the
l5-2-l6 upgrade guided by the Debian package dependency messages), I
performed upgrades of individual packages "by hand" via dpkg.
Basically, I would have a window open running dselect that would show
me a batch of packages that needed upgrading during the select point
of dselect. I would either print this screen out or flip screens back
and forth to decide which packages to upgrade. In another window I
would be running dpkg. I would cd to the directory containing the
packages (usually a batch of about 10 or less from the same category)
and only needed to type in the first few characters of the package
name followed by the tab key. I would typically install a batch of 10
or less at a time (with a single dpkg command). For example, I
started with the required packages in the base subdirectory. There
may be an even simpler way to do this with dpkg, but this was
sufficient for me and it worked!
This process took a couple of hours to about 8 hours depending on the
number of packages and complexity of the machine installation. I now
have a nice stable system. This method may not have been necessary on
these subsequent machines, but after the disaster of the first
machine, I was not willing to take chances.
There were a few minor configuration glitches, but the system is
largely quite clean to upgrade in this manner. I would now feel
comfortable to upgrade subsequent packages via dselect if needed.
However, it is usually quicker for smaller numbers of packages to
install directly via dpkg. In fact, I have found that I only use
dselect for finding packages to install on the Alpha (and now the
i386).
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