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.