Re: Understanding the two-year release cycle as a desktop user (and a Debian newcomer)
On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 08:59:55 +0000
Brad Rogers <brad@fineby.me.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:47:35 -0600
> John Hasler <jhasler@newsguy.com> wrote:
>
> Hello John,
>
> >blindly upgrading nightly causes far more problems than it solves.
>
> Because that's what gets asked about. Nobody posts saying;
>
> "I updated lasted night, and everything worked!"
>
> There's no point.
>
> However, I do recognise that you wrote 'blindly' and there, you're
> right.
>
I've found it rare for an upgrade to break anything, and if it does, I
have more than one computer. What is fairly common is that the upgrade
of a large system such as KDE or Qt takes place over a period of time,
making upgrading tedious for a week or two. A couple of weeks ago, I
had over 400 packages held up by a dependency on one new (and buggy)
library. But that's about as bad as it gets.
The last time I reinstalled sid was several years ago, on a mobile that
I don't upgrade often, and aptitude and apt-get both choked on about a
gigabyte of upgrades. The time before that must have been more than
fifteen years ago, when a damaged perl upgrade stopped the package
tools, even dpkg, from working, and it was beyond my abilities to fix
manually. But generally, if the apt tools still work, it's fixable, and
it's pretty rare for anything to need fixing.
If there is a breakage, the quick answer is to go back to the previous
version if it's in the cache, if it's not it can be found on the Net,
or if it's not a show-stopper, wait for it to be fixed.
--
Joe
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