Re: Can't upgrade from slink to woody!
On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 10:57:49AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 08:41:37PM +0000, Pigeon wrote:
> > I tried upgrading apt first, but of course it required me to upgrade
> > the @$?% C libraries... which breaks every other piece of software on
> > the system...
>
> I'm confused ... how does upgrading libc6 break everything else? (It
> doesn't.) You may have to upgrade a few other core packages, but not
> many.
Well, a few months ago, I found that the slink libc6 was not recent
enough for some binary or other I wanted to install. So I downloaded
the woody libc6 and did a dpkg -i on it. Result: instant disaster.
Every command I entered gave unresolved symbol errors. This included
dpkg, so I couldn't re-install the old one. It included shutdown, so I
couldn't shut down cleanly. It included things like mv and cp, so I
couldn't repair by hand. Maybe it didn't break everything, but it
broke everything that was dynamically linked, and made the system
completely unusable. And unbootable.
I had to boot from a floppy and reinstall stuff from the slink CD.
This didn't have a working gzip, so I had to decompress stuff using
WinZip and write it to another CD from Windoze, then boot Linux from
floppy and copy stuff across. It was a complete nightmare.
It was for this reason that I wanted to get hold of a full set of
woody CDs so I could let apt-get churn away upgrading both libc6 and
all the stuff that broke, all at the same time. Having got the CDs, I
then found that apt didn't work with them, so I said some very rude
words.
Still, since I had enough disk space to save all my old stuff just in
case, it turned out that the fresh installation was not much more
hassle than the complete upgrade would have been. And as a free bonus
it fixed the problem I'd been having configuring an NFS server with
which to install woody on my other box. I like /etc/network/interfaces.
So now I'm a happy pigeon. Thanks!
Pigeon
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