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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!
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.
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.
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'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));