Re: Broken Debian Installations
Pavel Epifanov <epv@casema.net> wrote:
> ...
> Dear Brian,
>
> I understand that POTATO is not released yet. But still this
> situation with broken installations was repeated several times for last
> months:
>
> 1) unknown script had changed a permission of root directory
> 2) kbd script asked for re-configiration of keyboard with low priority
> and "with help" of debconf setup the french keyboard layout
> 3) netscape has been removed due to dependency mistake
>
> All above are very serious problems which required a lot of knowledge
> of system to recover. You normally can't protect well agains such
> changes as soon as you need to be root to install them.
>
> Do you know a way to protect systems from such mistakes ?
> Full system backup before _every_ installation does not looks
> as best decision for the usual workstation computer.
I'm not Brian but here goes.
There were some crippling mistakes by packagers in potato while
it was unstable. But unstable is assumed to be for those who
are familiar enough with Debian to get themselves out of trouble.
These users are helping to test the distribution before it
becomes the next stable.
It's been a problem this last round in that stable is
very old and lacking some useful (and necessary for some)
features. So many moved on to potato. It looks like
future cycles will be much shorter.
Some things you can do if you want to stay cutting-edge are to
wait several days after major packages are updated -- libc, perl,
bash.... the things that will cripple your system if you have
troubles with them. During those days watch the bug report list
and deb-user and deb-devel. Don't be a guinea pig unless you're
confident you can get out of trouble. Another thing you can do
is download a few known good packages of the major apps and hide
them in a corner somewhere so you can downgrade if things go so
nuts you can't bring anything in.
I'd also recommend staying away from dselect. apt-get upgrade
will allow you to break out in the cases where some new package
decides it wants to remove dozens of conflicting packages.
Dselect seems to just go ahead and do it.
Rick
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