Slashdot Mirror
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."
I haven't had problems with up2date on my production server... exactly the way I like it. I trust RH a bit more (but not too much more) than Debian to provide stable upgrades on their RHEL distro. For our own development, we made a couple python scripts that lets us fetch and build the libraries we need for our projects... that works quite well if you're working with a known set of libraries.
see a Text Widget
Will this cause all the Debian zealots to shut their mouths and stop claiming that Debian is the "most stable" linux distribution out there?
I doubt it.
My advice is to switch to SuSE. I was once a devoted Slackware user, tried Red Crap once and then started using SuSE at 6.3 and have been happy with it since. I always stay about a version behind, to let any problems get discovered and fixed before updating. I also tend to install new versions freshly to a clean disk, mount my old system's disk and move my custom stuff over to the new disk a piece at a time, but the past couple SuSE updates have overlay-installed onto an existing system quite nicely. SuSE is getting quite refined.
Downgrade the troll above, please.
Please do elaborate. How exactly was I trolling? I was speaking out of frustration as a Debian user, not as some asshat who likes to flame Debian. You, on the other hand, simply painted me as a troll, but couldn't be bothered to debunk any misconceptions you believe I'm propagating.
When some Debian user acts like a zealot, he's bound to take a fall, as is anyone who over-defends anything.
I - as a Debian user and developer - have no problem admitting that Debian has some problems, even though I do prefer the few organizational issues to some principle issue, which is the reason I've stuck with Debian so far and probably will keep doing so.
Debian is a big project and there is no shame in having problems, with such an ambitious modus operandi.
My call of FUD is aimed solely at the wording in the original post. It's like the following fictional post situation:
"Slashdot is full of trolls and FUD, most of what is posted there are lies or exagerations"
as opposed to:
"Slashdot has, as any site of such proportions is bound to have, many users which pollute it's information base, but still, there is good information to be mined"
Maybe I find it so offensive because I never held Debian to such high standards as to not have problems. Big upgrade leaps have always been prone to problems, in every distribuition, due to the very nature of the complex package relationship.