Debian, updates and a working system: regression test
Dear Friends,
I have beem tinkering on and off with Debian at least since 1996 (Buzz,
1.1) :) My use has mainly been on my personal machines be it home system
or laptops.
My current incarnation is a Debian sid system on my beloved IBM T40
Thinkpad. What a sweet assortment.
I quite regularly update/upgrade with apt-listbugs giving some warnings
from times to times.
So far I never had some major outage striking me.
But here comes the consideration/question.
My system has slightly over 700 packages installed.
Running a roughly weekly upgrade shows 10-20 packages that can be upgraded.
This morning going from memory I remember some alsa stuff,
kernel-package, xserver-xfree86, mondo, gimp ...
Now despite what apt-listbugs says it could happen that one of these
packages could break something on my system.
Specific to the list I would imagine that I could run the following
related battery of tests:
alsa upgraded -> sound works, even after a reboot ?
kernel-package -> see if my splendid make-kpkg shell works aok
xserver -> is the desktop showing; even after a reboot ? (this one is
obvious)
mondo -> try a full backup and if a real man also a restore
gimp -> obvious
Sometimes things are less obvious. For instance an hotplug upgrade with
a new developers config removed a blacklisted device
If something in samba or cups changes I could suddendly find myself
printing ok on network printers but not on the windows shared ones.
So either I run a series of tests each time (hardly feasible) or shen I
try something and it does not work I cannot be sure which upgrade of
which component (as opposed to my changes to configs) broke the function.
Is there some better way out of this maintenance problem ? Of course I
know I could run a "stable" release system but that is not the point I
want to make.
Thank you for reading and I hope to get some interesting debate on this.
Bob
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