Re: What's the best package manager for single-package upgrades?#
On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 01:51:45PM -0800, Joe Rhett wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > Joe Rhett wrote:
> > > If testing is what is supposed to be the next release, then it seems
> > > pointless to even bother. "Testing" still has Mozilla 1.0. That's what,
> > > 2 years old?
> >
> > We're working on it, but the mozilla package is buggy, which makes it
> > difficult to make the testing management scripts happy with it.
>
> So buggy that it runs 2 years behind?
If that weren't the case then it wouldn't be two years behind. This is a
somewhat circular argument, but nevertheless true. (Sometimes we've been
in the position where an upgrade to mozilla would break another
package.)
The release team are more than aware that this is not a tenable
situation, though. It'll have to be resolved somehow before releasing
sarge.
> > > > Well, that's basically exactly how it works. There's quite a few extra
> > > > details but that's the "meat and potatoes" of it so to speak. :)
> > >
> > > Then why is there really zero updates in testing?
> >
> > That's just rubbish, sorry. (I help manage testing; I watch what it's
> > doing almost every day.)
>
> Let me rephrase. Either the US mirrors are screwed, or there is less than
> a dozen packages in testing. Because adding testing to the sources list
> and doing an apt-get update (which was successful) and then trying to
> upgrade packages gets me next to nothing. I found hundreds more packages
> in 'security' than I did in testing, which actually baffles me since they
> should have much of the same content according to the debian guidelines.
Ah, that would explain your confusion. 'apt-get upgrade' isn't what you
want, since as documented in the apt-get(8) man page it will not install
new packages. In particular, if you attempt to use 'apt-get upgrade' to
upgrade from stable to testing, it will refuse to upgrade libc6 because
of that package's new dependency on libdb1-compat, and therefore
virtually nothing else will be upgraded because it almost all depends on
the new libc6.
Don't use 'apt-get upgrade' to upgrade from one version of the
distribution to the next. That said, it should have told you that some
big number of packages were being held back.
> Perhaps my product selections are biased: I really could care less about
> the latest and greatest desktop. They are pretty. But a browser that
> actually works is required to do my job, for example.
Testing has a perfectly usable version of mozilla-firebird, which I'd
argue is a much better browser than plain mozilla.
> Updates to the wireless drivers to improve device support would be
> useful.
Kernel updates go in pretty quickly, as a rule. wireless-tools is up to
date in testing, and linux-wlan-ng is only a fraction behind unstable.
> Stuff that has been safe and stable within Sid for over a year now
> (according to the package pages) still isn't appearing in testing.
Examples, please? I'd be happy to look at them and see what I can do; I
can certainly explain what problems are involved.
> In short, it appears that if one actually wants to use Debian as a
> desktop, one has no choice but to throw the debian guidelines out the
> window and run with unstable.
I actually use Debian testing as a desktop, eight hours a day, five days
a week. It works great.
> This means you lose commonality with any server 'stable' systems you
> might need to run.
As far as commonality goes (although I don't quite understand what you
mean here), you should regard testing as closer to unstable in terms of
versions of software than to stable, because for the most part it is,
particularly in recent months.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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