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

Evidence of problems with packaging systems

[AKAImBatman]

Chief among the problems, he said, were cyclic dependencies and the fact that software installation tool apt depended heavily on the changing C++ libraries.

Let this be a lesson to those of you who claimed that "APT is unbreakable." There's no such thing as an unbreakable technology. There is however, such a thing as a robust technology that resists failure. As packaging systems go, APT is fairly good. However, my belief is that packaging systems are inherently flawed.

What you want in an OS, is a method for determining the precise core upon which you can base your applications on. Such a core would effectively be an immutable set of system APIs that cannot be changed. The upshot to this situation is that the given system is verifyable. i.e. I can have a script go through and ensure that everything that should exist does exist. From that information, I can then do a delta to find out what exists that shouldn't exist.

This is in direct opposition to a packaging system that builds an OS out of inter-dependent components. The problem with such a strategy is that using inter-dependent components only works if you're building from scratch. As anyone who has managed a version control system can tell you, things get extremely complicated (and tend to require manual intervention) as soon as files start branching. The same thing happens in packaging systems as soon as you start doing upgrades to individual components. Soon you find yourself with a mess of mismatched dependencies which require constant manual intervention to solve. Not a good situation.

In the case of a defined core, you can simply wipe out the old core and replace it with the new one. As long as testing has been done to ensure that the new components are still backward compatible with old software, everything should work fine after the upgrade.

Food for thought, anyway. To the Debian team: Thanks for the new release! Even if there are some growing pains, it's still nice to see you back in the game. :-)

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.

Re:Evidence of problems with packaging systems

[KiloByte]

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.
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 :p

Re:Evidence of problems with packaging systems

[Qzukk]

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.

Typical Debian!

[JimDabell]

Obviously this was a rushed job. Typical Debian, always cutting corners, never taking the time to do things properly :P.

Re:Update took me two days ... grrr

[BeBoxer]

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.

Re:Mixing Lilo and some kernel configs not nice ei

[Qzukk]

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