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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."
Well duh, if you wait that long between release cycles...you're going to have some major problems upgrading, as everything you had was ancient and everything you're upgrading to is mearly old.
:( .
I love debian for their philosophy; however, when I tried their distribution and it downgraded the kernel from 2.4 to 2.2 when 2.6 had already come out....I don't think I even started X before deleting it. Maybe I'd have had a different experience if someone had told me "testing" didn't mean what it usually does.
All of that said, it seems these problems could probably have been avoided with more testing,
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
Exactly.. Ubuntu came in at the right time ... I dont think I will go back to Debian..
the desire to upgrade in the sense of using software to overwrite existing software. When a new release comes out and I need to use it for whatever reason, I build a new machine and then get everything working in parallel with the existing older release before replacing the older machine with the newer one. I hate upgrading. It causes bit rot, breaks things per the article, and generally creates ugliness. It is almost always better to do a virgin install, even in a production environment. Parallel testing works like a charm.
Give it a rest.
The Linux Standard Base is dead.
There is too much freedom for even the distributions to make cores effectively. Debian doesn't develop the software, they package it. They have no direct control over compatibility issues between versions in their software. This makes their job a whole lot harder than in commercial OS's where one entity controls both the core software and the packaging.
They also don't have the resources to making security patches for every package without upgrading to a newer version of said package (i.e. backporting). They really do a phenominal job given their constraints.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
This is FUD, even by Slashdot standards.
The problems do exist, but the "severe breakage" described does not implicate unbootable machines or unusable software. Cyclical dependencies mostly mean the algorithm used to select packages for upgrade or instalation will not run as expected and probably leave the problematic package on hold.
This is not a new problem and affects Debian mainly because of it's distributed and loosely coupled model of organization, where integration problems can go by unoticed for quite some time.
The original mail intended to push more developers into taking action about these integration errors and make sure the upgrade paths are always clear, which is a very big and important task.
I, for one, hope his message doesn't fall on deaf ears, but also hope it doesn't generate more FUD like this.
The very concept of "version" is obsolete I think. There should never be a big-bang system upgrade, and there should never be a fixed version number for a Debian system. Packages should have versions, and those should be upgraded. Distributions should not be numbered.
The ideal way to handle things is to roll out upgraded packages when they are ready. If you upgrade your system once a day or once a week, you should not ever have to deal with more than a handful of updated packages. Over time, everything would eventually be upgraded.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
They also don't have the resources to making security patches for every package without upgrading to a newer version of said package (i.e. backporting). They really do a phenominal job given their constraints.
:-)
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm not attempting to "diss" the Debian distro or its maintainers. I'm only pointing out that the packaging system is beginning to strain under the pressure of so many packages. The complexity of the package system is quickly becoming too difficult to maintain. Especially since the packaging system mixes the core system APIS with the user applications. (Always a recipe for trouble.) Thus it is time to start thinking about something new.
The Linux Standard Base is dead.
The LSB was always about the "least common denominator" and not about "the most usable configuration". For what it was, it wasn't too bad. But a real standard at this point would have to define a lot more libraries, although perhaps at more of a library version level than trying to force the individual APIs.
With that in mind, I don't think that such a standard should be attempted across all distros. For one, that would limit their ability to be different and provide new competitive services. For another, it tends to be better to allow a few different standards to compete before you attempt to pick one or two out of the fold. For example, there used to be many standards for Linus base distros. Now all distros tend to fork from either RedHat or Debian. Standards thus emerged.
The same thing should happen today. We should see different distros attempt differing solutions to the issue and see which ones work best. Symphony is certainly one of the most interesting, but mostly because it's the first attempt to break away from the current designs that Linux is stuck in.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If they statically linked it. Which they should really do for a base level of core utilities anyway. I've been burned by library upgrades and crippled recovery processes several times in the past because the correct libraries were no longer available. For something that might have a library pulled out from under it like apt, it really makes sense to incur the size penalty so that you never have to worry about it dying on you when you replace system libraries.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I haven't had problems with up2date on my production server
Bully for you. Personally, I've had trouble with up2date getting stuck in an infinite loop when it tries to remove the old version of the just-upgraded rpm about every 10th rpm that it upgrades on two of my production servers. I have to kill it and remove the old package with rpm -e.
Don't even get me started about how rpm usually silently replaces your config file with the stock config file during an upgrade.
And this is on minor security upgrades. Red Hat doesn't even attempt to upgrade from one major release to the next while the system is online. You have to take the server down for hours for that.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Ubuntu is more of a desktop, latest updates type distro, while Debian is a strong, server type distro. So which do you need, depends on if you want a desktop or server, make your choice.
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Thanks genius, but that doesn't answer any of my questions.
Here's another one of my top gripes about Linux. I ask a question, and I get a stupid answer from dumb snot who clearly doesn't understand the question.
Listing the packages is easy. But your solution doesn't deal with patchlevels at all, or show how to verify the installed packges in a patchlevel, or check to see if any files are missing from the packages, etc. You can do some of this stuff with individual packages, but not with clusters of patches.
I can do that in the big Unixes, but the concept seems foreign to Linux users. It's sad, really.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I'm not really getting you on this one.
I think RHEL does the kind of thing you're asking for.
I think of the Linux world as split in two. There are distros that are fundamentally CD based - like Fedora core, RHEL, Xandros, SuSe, etc. The CD based distribution system lends itself to the kind of thing you're talking about: patchlevels, service packs, batch upgrades - it provides known checkpoints for your OS.
Then there are distros that are internet based - they use central repositories to manage software, and though they may come on a CD, it's really just a snapshot. Debian and Gentoo come to mind in this category. The idea of a central repository is antithetical to your notion of checkpoints and patchlevels. Everything is a moving target, even in Debian stable, testing and unstable.
All that said, I don't do a lot of server-level verify-my-whole-machine-with-md5 with any of my Linux boxes. I upgrade packages when I need to, either for new hardware or new features, and things generally work really well, and maybe on occasion some ebuild will break something and I have to go put out the fire. Of course, I use masked packages all over the place, so I expect that now and then (couple times a year). Maybe RHEL/CentOS would be more akin to your experiences with AIX and Solaris.
This isn't a new idea, and you can do it right now. Just install your packages from source and while building them, make sure that either:
- You link everything statically, or
- All libraries required for an app get installed within that app's directory.
This way no app will interfere with any other, and you can upgrade any of them without having to worry about library dependency conflicts. The disadvantages are increased disk usage (probably not a big deal nowadays), increased memory usage because libraries won't be shared in memory (may or may not be a big deal, depending on your system usage), and more work on your part. But if these things don't bother you, have at it!--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
And there is always some post like yours, which clearly demonstrates you haven't even tried to figure out the answer to this simple question.
/usr/share/doc/changelog.Debian
rpm systems: rpm -q --changelog
deb systems:
These are almost always more informative that the kind of crap I see on commercial unixes.
There is no such things as "patch levels" or "clusters of patches" in any linux distro I know of.
It is, in fact, a rather dumb idea anyway.
Each package is updated alone, as it should be.
rpm systems: rpm -q --changelog /usr/share/doc/changelog.Debian
deb systems:
You dipshit, he's not asking for a zillion pages of notes, he's asking for the patch level. Is that really such a hard topic for you to understand?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I've flirted with the idea of installing Linux on a spare box. Is this nonesense the kind of stuff I should expect?
Do you have a reason to try Linux? Just from your tone you sound rather apprehensive of it in the first place. See if this describes you: "I'll just give it a shot so I can see why everyone is making such a stink about it. Then my condescending attitude will be justified because I actually did try it and didn't like it."
Frankly, even though you are obviously a "serious computer user" since you "create media" and "edit audio," if you don't have an idea of why you might want to switch to Linux, you aren't going to find a reason by just trying it out. What you'll probably find is that you can't figure out how to easily do the things you want to do in one afternoon. Or maybe you will, but they won't be any easier or wow-bang than just doing it in Windows. So you'll shrug your shoulders, wonder why everyone is making such a stink about it, and wipe the drive.
You should have a reason when you decide to do something, even if that reason is just to explore. If you were the exploring type, you would have already tried it, rather than just "flirted with the idea" of trying it, so that one is out. If you don't have another reason, you'll just be wasting your time. Honestly, it's the same with any decision in your life. Try thinking through things, rather than just randomly trying them because you know they exist.
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Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
It's very sad, IMO. While OSS projects are trying to make their UI look like the old Mac OS (and crippling it in the process), they're not addressing the Linux user's inability to administrate their own systems simply and effectively.
No one in FOSS seems to 'get' that every home and small office user is basically their own system administartor. Yet they are not offered a structured environment where admin tasks like installing 3rd party apps are trivial.
As a new Mac user, I used to hold out hope that Debian would change Linux desktops for the better. But the only way Debian can help is if it puts its foot down damanding LSB compliance, and creates a new package structure that physically honors this core functionality.
Until something like that happens, things will remain chaotic. The kernel is not a sufficient core for the desktop.