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Debian Upgrade May Cause Serious Breakage
daria42 writes "Debian developer Bill Allombert has e-mailed the Debian community saying he estimates about 30% of users upgrading from Debian Woody to Sarge will suffer 'serious breakage'. Allombert says the upgrade process suffers from a number of bugs reported before the release went live several days ago. Chief among the problems, he said, were cyclic dependencies and the fact that software installation tool apt depended heavily on the changing C++ libraries. Allombert wants developers to test the upgrade cycle continuously during development and not just during the freeze period just before release."
What, specifically, are the apps that will cause the problems and how does he determine that 30% of the boxes out there will have those apps?
I've upgrade 6 boxes and have not had a single problem on any of them. They run a combination of Apache, perl, python, mySQL, php, bind9, DHCP, etc.
If there is a circular dependency problem on an app, but no one uses that app, then there won't be any problem upgrading.
We had a Woody to Sarge upgrade fail on boot because Lilo barfed a kernel panic on root mount. Installing grub fixed it. I forgot how the lilo was set up prior to sarge, but whatever. My suggestion if you have SATA root mounts: Install grub before installing Sarge!
If your setup is simple enough, just clone your drives and test the upgrade process on the clones.
If anything goes wrong, you can just drop the originals back in and everything will be back to the way you started.
You should always test new deployments before putting them into production.
rpm -qa (rpm based distros)
dpkg -l (deb based distros)
Thank you, next question.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
The only issue is: if you don't read the freaking release notes, you will have problems. The apt in Woody is broken. The release notes say that you need to update it first, to let it handle circular dependencies.
:p
The only fault of Debian is not putting this in a bold enough font.
Also, this breakage gives us a yet another reason to bash C++ as a poor excuse for a language
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
WTF were you doing using "apt-get dist-upgrade" anyway. If you'd read the release notes then you'd now that the recommended way of doing the upgrade was to use aptitude to prevent just those sorts of problems.
Suddenly apt-get dist-upgrade didnt do anything good, I had to do an apt-get -f install multiple times until the dependancy stuff was sorted out. In the process, some packages (notably apache and ftpd) were simple de-installed and I had to re-select them manually.
I can't say for sure that it would have helped, but the instructions specifically say to use aptitude because it handles dependencies better that apt. So while I feel your pain, I'm not sure it's a valid complaint.
You might want to read the release notes before upgrading:
http://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/releasenotes
...which specifically recommend using aptitude rather than apt-get.
That's not quite true. For example, the staticly linked apt in a previous upgrade could run in to trouble looking up DNS entries. The problem? /etc/nsswitch.conf got upgraded and the staticly linked DNS library didn't understand some of the new options.
However, offering a staticly linked apt would probably have helped.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
SATA changed from IDE subsystem in 2.2 and early 2.4 to libata (and therefore part of the SCSI system) in 2.4 and 2.6
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Unsurprisingly, Debian already lets you do this -- if you keep your sources.list pointed at "testing" all the time, you would get more or less this behavior, with the caveat that cruft would probably never be removed. (Python 1.5.2, anyone?)
I am planning to do this with one of my boxes at home, for that best-of-both-worlds feeling.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Lets take the words apart:
cyclic - as in circular, comes back to the original point. example: phases of the moon
dependency - something depended on. program A depends on library B, B is a dependency of A. Of course, B may depend on C.
Putting it all together: circle of dependencies
A depends on B depends on C depends on A
Makes it really hard to decide what to do first. Chicken and the egg problem.
If you have a problem figuring out what this all means, at least head for a linux that is built more for an enduser (I've heard good things about ubuntu, mandrake is usually alright, but I don't have direct experience with either).
out of ~15 systems i've upgraded to sarge in the last two days, i've had major troubles with 3 of them, and expect the same on two more.
.debs), script s scattered all over (because you just know different admins like them in different places) and hardcoded paths.
:)
one of these 5 systems i tried to upgrade from apache to apache2 (non-critical system, so i could afford the downtime), another was a former production system that we pulled from the cluster to test the upgrade.
it would be a fallacy to expect a completly seamless upgrade for any system with major configurations that's been in use for more than a few years. what with the backports (because sometimes you just can't avoid em), packages installed from source (.tar.gz, not
despite all these caveats, it's still pretty easy to upgrade, so long as you know your systems. just don't do it outside a maintenance window
I mean, come on, there were 10,000 pairs of eyes looking at the source code and fixing bugs before it was released, right?
Right. And they fixed the bug, and told everyone that apt was broken and to upgrade to the fixed apt before attempting to upgrade to sarge.
And nobody listened.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
>I have no idea what a "cyclic dependency" is nor do
> I want to know.
It's plain English.
>I've flirted with the idea of installing Linux on a
> spare box. Is this nonesense the kind of stuff I
>should expect?
Of course not. It's just a possible consequence associated with the complications of having the wide variety of packages with the huge number of possible combinations that Debian has. But that's a GOOD thing, even if it can be a little overwhelming. There are other distributions where choices are firmly made for you. I prefer one that lets me make choices. I can accept the potential consequence that my choices may make things a little more complex.
Initial installation on Debian, especially if you start with a live Debian-based distro like Knoppix or Ubuntu, is really quite easy. If you're starting from scratch on a spare box, it's super easy.
The only nonsense you shoud really *expect* are:
1. Be prepared to do some research on any wi-fi hardware, and try to find out in advance if you need NDISWrapper. This is one of my pet peeves,
since wireless networking is quite the killer app these days, and the community seems comfortable passing the buck.
2. It might not magically put your window manager at the resolution that you want. This shouldn't take more than a little googling to fix, but it can be annoying.
3. Audio, particularly if you plan to record audio, is a subsystem with its own issues. Audio playback tends to be much easier these days, but I'm into multitrack recording, making synthesizers, etc. It's pretty tough to follow, even with a lot of experience.
4. DVD video playback. Aggressively suppressed by the motion picture industry; community is rebellious enough to have useable players on the fringe, but remains willing to pass the buck. Perfectly understandable, but still quite a nuisance.
5. Laptop power management - I have yet to see it work well on a linux laptop. The latest Ubuntu's hibernate command just crashes my Toshiba. Power management is on the short list of really important features of a laptop. Maybe it can be made to work, but I have not managed it for years of trying.
I have a long, long list of annoyances with every system, so don't get me wrong here. I'm just trying to point out a few items that I can pretty much guarantee will get in your way at some point.
A lot of work is being done in all these areas, but some things like WiFi and DVD playback have some very solid showstoppers (like the threat of prison).
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I'm not sure what weed you're smoking, but Debian backports ALL of their security fixes from upstream software to the version packaged in stable. Really, consult the Debian Security FAQ for more details.
assert(expired(knowledge));
The subject of the parent is itself suspect of reasonable objectivity. How does one kill a highly successful distribution that is 100% driven by the community at large?
"Take freaking forever to freeze for a release." There were a number of mitigating issues regarding Sarge, not the least of which was creating a new installation suite modular enough to work on all 11 ported architectures (not two dozen). Few can claim more portability. The second largest hold-up was the lack of an autobuild infrastructure for security updates. This was exhaserbated by hardware failures of key buildd daemons, etc. Regardless, time between releases is a sore subject for Debian Developers as well as the users. It is well-discussed on the lists, and in the public archive. Feel free to search debian-release, debian-project, and debian-devel for the relavent discussions.
"Take freaking forever to ship after freezing." I'm not actually sure what was meant by this. The freeze was done in steps, and once the actual freeze was announced, the release happened blazingly fast by most standards. However, this is subjective to POV.
"Ship a broken upgrade even after all the damn testing." How did Debian ship a "broken upgrade?" It created a few ISO images with a typo in /etc/apt/sources.list which prevented updates from an archive that contained no packages yet. What was broken? Additionally, published release notes and detailed installation instructions outlined the difficulties you might find during an upgrade from woody to sarge. What known breakages were hidden from view? What malicious intent did Debian have?
Seriously, to use your phrasology, the above post is nothing more than flamebait. If you don't like Debian's release cycle, either roll up your sleeves and participate in the process to improve it, or jump ship and use something like Ubuntu. Debian is not dead, is not in danger of dying, and could benefit more from helpful contributions than rants about its shortcomings.
I have failed in these posts by feeding the troll. I haven't provided a new defense or pointed out new facts. All of this information is available for those that would search (with little effort, mind you) for it. Happy hacking, and happy feeding.
assert(expired(knowledge));