On Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:21:44 +0100 Moritz Muehlenhoff <[email protected]>
wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 09:46:59PM +0900, Mike Hommey wrote:
> > For clarity, do you mean you're fine with a iceweasel->firefox-esr
> > transition in stable(jessie) when we upgrade to 45? (which will be
by 45.2,
> > at the beginning of June)
>
> It's likely a lot easier on your side if we do that, right?
>
> It might actually even also be simpler for us, since we wouldn't need
to track two
> different source package names for several years.
>
> If the respective transition packages are in place, that seems acceptable
> to me (after all we had a in comparison more drastic UI change
between ESR24
> and ESR31).
I found this thread while checking when I should expect weasel-ESR31 to
go (and when to worry if it doesn't).
I'm fine with this idea in principle. However, some users will be
surprised by transitional packages _within_ a stable release. Upgrading
to a transitional package does not happen when "apt-get upgrade" is used.
I _think_ it'll be ok for many people because PackageKit does
"dist-upgrade". PK may prompt about installing additional packages
(which is sub-optimal, but about par for Debian on the desktop).
Unfortunately there *are* some setups which will fail this.
---
It looks like `unattended-upgrades` uses `apt-get update`.
`unattended-upgrades` does include modes designed for desktop systems.
[1]
http://askubuntu.com/questions/251303/how-to-automatically-install-updates-before-shutdown
I get paranoid about this, because my experience is both Debian 7 and 8
installs lack working update notifications.
[2]
http://blog.tenstral.net/2015/09/update-notifications-in-debian-jessie.html
This means a) I notice some desktop QA problem, so I should try to
contribute to it; b) some desktops which _do_ have working update
notifications will have been randomly hacked until they seemed to work.
E.g. using unattended-upgrades as per the first link above :(.
I don't have a suggestion, other than strongly recommend PK & making
sure it's working. Just sharing the pain that flared up again when
reading your words :-P. Fortunately Stretch fixes gnome update
notifications, at least when I last tested.
---
There was eventually a recommended backport (apt-config-auto-update), as
a good hack to make PK work (about as well as update-manager used to).
So that would be fine for transitional packages. Other users may have
switched back to update-manager. I _hope_ that's ok due to coming from
Ubuntu, where they assume "dist-upgrade" is used e.g. to get kernel updates.
Synaptic is also installed by default, and does not `dist-update`. It
does not provide a prompt, but it does warn. Apparently the warning
includes the package names, so it should be _relatively_ obvious.
It looks like "apt-get update" is also used by the example configuration
for `cron-apt`. (Whereas apticron looks to use dist-upgrade). If
either of these kick off while Firefox is running, Firefox will crash.
(The Chrome people have a whole rant about this :D). So I don't expect
updates-from-cron to be too common on desktops.
Regards
Alan
