Re: sid upgrade
On Thu, 12 Sep 2013 23:14:01 +0200
François Patte <francois.patte@mi.parisdescartes.fr> wrote:
> Le 12/09/2013 20:51, Brian a écrit :
> > On Thu 12 Sep 2013 at 19:44:46 +0200, François Patte wrote:
> >
> >> I made an attempt to upgrade sid (amd64); apt-get report some bugs:
>
> >> Summary:
> >> libklibc(1 bug), debhelper(1 bug), dh-python(1 bug), upower(1 bug)
> >>
> >> is it safe to proceed or shall I wait untill these bugs are
> >> corrected?
> >
> > If you have set up your system to get such a report the onus is on
> > you to look at the bug and come to a judgement. Not proceeding
> > loses you nothing; you are not obliged to upgrade Sid.
>
> Thanks for answering. I have not "setup my system to get such a
> report", I have setup my system to have a system working for me with
> softwares that I need. I did not ask to have something like
> "debhelper" or "dh-python", I never try to build packages, but these
> packages were installed as dependancies and I cannot master this
> while installing my system...
>
> The dependancy problem is very difficult to understand, I can only
> trust the packagers. My question is: "I don't need debhelper, and I
> did not want to install it, but if, for any reasons that I can't
> understand, it is necessary to install it, is the warning about a
> non-corrected bug will break anything that I need and that I instaled
> because I needed it?"
>
>
You can look up the dependencies of a package with the apt tools, and
decide whether you use any which depend on the package. Or you can
simply try aptitude remove debhelper and see what aptitude also needs
to remove to satisfy the dependencies. If you don't recognise any of
them, then go ahead. If you're absolutely certain that you don't need
any of the items to be removed, repeat the command with 'purge' instead
of 'remove', and the configuration files in /etc will also be removed,
keeping things tidier. If you only use 'remove', then the configuration
is not touched, and if you find a problem later you can reinstall, and
the old configuration will be used. Your call.
I don't make packages, and I don't have debhelper installed, but if you
try removal and find that debhelper is a dependency of an application
which you do use, and which has nothing to do with development, then
someone may have made an error. As a user of sid, you should raise this
as a Debian bug, when the package maintainer will either issue a new
revision with corrected dependencies, or he will rather tersely point
out why the dependency exists, and close the bug. You might want to have
a quick look at the package history first, to see if the dependency has
been explicitly mentioned and explained.
What Brian was pointing out was that nobody but you can say what to do
about a bug which turns up during an upgrade. Only you know how heavily
you depend on the package(s) involved, or how badly you need the very
latest version(s). Almost all problems can be solved by waiting for a
while to upgrade a few packages now and then.
My rule of thumb is to update sid nearly every day, and to ignore
packages with bugs. If, after a few days, the bug hasn't been fixed
(and most will be) then I may investigate the package to see whether
the bug will be a problem for me, or whether I can remove the package.
I do a certain amount of experimentation, and I'm terrible at cleaning
up afterwards, so every now and then I find a bug in a package I've
never used, and take the opportunity to remove it.
Sometimes you won't get the bug report in advance: a few weeks ago, a
new file which was necessary for the upgraded LXDE was not in place in
the repository when it was first needed. A dependency mistake had been
made, and there was no warning when packages requiring the file were
upgraded. The result was that the LX Panel no longer worked, making
application launching much slower. Nobody else seemed to have this
problem, so no bug report had been raised. I tried one of the standard
responses, and tried to reinstall LXDE, but the installer spotted the
problem and refused. Eventually the file turned up in the repository,
but another was missing. About three weeks after the first problem,
everything was sorted and LXDE was again installable. I didn't bother
raising this as a bug, as I could see that both of the offending files
were on the way, they already existed in other distributions, and that
it was only a matter of time before they turned up.
This is exactly the kind of problem which turns up occasionally in sid.
I had almost all of Xfce installed, to I pulled in the rest and
switched to Xfce for a while. Or I could have carried on using LXDE
without the panel, which is probably what I would have done if I knew
what was going on. When reinstallation failed, I could have tracked
down the old packages in .deb form, and reinstalled them with dpkg. The
point here is that you do have to be prepared for this kind of trouble,
and to be able to do without bits of sid for a while.
--
Joe
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