Re: How i do upgrade my operating system to Debian “buster”?
On Sun, 10 Jan 2021 21:39:29 +0200
Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Du, 10 ian 21, 16:58:57, Joe wrote:
> >
> > I thought of the --get-selections route, but decided against it.
> > There may be a few specific packages responsible for the problems.
> > Certainly an exact clone is exactly what I don't want. So I'm
> > spending a lot of time with apt, taking the opportunity to change a
> > few packages, lose some of those I suspect I never use, and
> > re-learning how to configure the larger packages.
>
> In case you have popularity-contest installed try
> 'popcon-largest-unused' (relies on atime).
>
> > Did you know it is possible to get the latest Firefox into a state
> > where it will not run, even after reinstalling? 'Replace/delete the
> > profile', say the gurus, and all will be well. 'Run the Profile
> > Manager'. The Profile Manager will not run because it can't find a
> > profile. How stupid is that, when it is the means of creating a new
> > profile? The fix was to copy the profile from the old installation,
> > which I'm trying to avoid doing because some of the problems I'm
> > having may well be due to damaged profiles or configurations. I
> > want a shiny new sid, not something containing rusty bits of the
> > old one.
>
> BTW, if I recall correctly the daily mini.iso in expert mode can be
> used to install sid directly. This is documented somewhere, so search
> engines should find it.
>
>
I had no trouble installing sid, though I did it my usual way of
installing a minimal stable, then upgrading, then piling on the
software. Upgrading from stable to unstable has always worked for me if
there is pretty much only the base system installed. The Firefox problem
wasn't difficult to solve, but solving it shouldn't have been
necessary. Start a new Firefox installation without a profile, and it
will make a new one, or at least it always has, but not this time.
I was making the point that reinstallation of a bare operating system
is simple and quick, but rebuilding a machine with a lot of installed
software is neither simple nor quick. My old workstation currently has
over 4000 packages installed. Most of those are automatically
installed, and I could probably lose 1000 by leaving out applications I
don't use and their dependencies. It's still a couple of days' work to
install and configure the rest. A few have configuration files
scattered around the filesystem, like the many php.ini files. There are
a few sillinesses, such as apache2 having a php module in which
execution of .php files is explicitly disabled. Back to Google...
If I was changing operating systems, upgrading would have been the way
to go. But I was reinstalling the same version to clear out the cruft of
many years, the old installation was a six-year-old --get-selections
copy of the previous one, which would itself have been five to ten
years old. Also, hopefully, clearing out whatever combination of damaged
packages was causing the upgrade logjam. Certainly I have already
installed the latest versions of at least two packages stuck in the
logjam, so it should be worth the effort. There was something nasty in
guile, and I have reinstalled packages that depend on guile with no
problem.
--
Joe
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