Re: upgrading to unstable KDE
On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 05:20:44PM -0500, Levi Waldron wrote:
> I'm running Woody right now, but am tempted to dselect-upgrade KDE to the
> 3.10 in unstable (because of the improvements to kmail). Any thoughts
> on the potential pain/painlessness of this upgrade, before I try it? If
> there's a fair chance of having to spend a lot of time fixing a broken
> system, I'll just wait for it to arrive in testing.
I ran a dist-upgrade to unstable a couple of weeks ago and it went
pretty smoothly, but YMMV. I've found that you stand less of a chance
of things going wrong with a small number of packages to start with and
then installing them once you're fully in unstable. My starting stable
setup consisted of base, C/C++ dev, X and blackbox. I usually take the
machine from stable to testing, then testing to unstable. Last I
checked some KDE packages in unstable were uninstallable, but by
grabbing individual packages I got everything I needed. In other words,
trying to install the 'kde' metapackage failed, but installing kdebase,
the browing throug the results of 'apt-cache search kde | less' I managed
to get everything else. KDE3.1 seems to be in a pretty nice working
state in unstable at the moment.
That being said, you'll probably run into a few false starts during the
dist-upgrade - few conflicting packages that need to be tweaked manually
or temporarily removed with dpkg (sometimes using some sort of --force).
Once you get the hang of it, unstable transitions aren't so bad, but
having a small amont of packages to upgrade as well as some experience
"massaging" the packages to get out of dist-upgrade problems (most of
the time a --fix-missing will do the trick) helps.
So if I haven't given you enough mixed messages, just do it when you
have some time on your hands, and if your system is at all "mission
critical" - don't do it at all.
Rob
Reply to: