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."

Comments

Re:Evidence of problems with packaging systems

[Tharkban]

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.

so long and thanks for all the FUD

[costela]

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.

Re:Evidence of problems with packaging systems

[AKAImBatman]

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. :-)

Apt Would be Unbreakable

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:I was waiting for Sarge but then came Ubuntu.

[varmittang]

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.