Package: upgrade-reports Severity: normal I just upgraded a laptop system from lenny to squeeze, and ran into a pile of issues that made the upgrade rougher than optimal. I took notes during the upgrade, and I've expanded on those notes here to produce a list of issues that could have gone a lot smoother in the upgrade process.
- I started the upgrade within X. Partway through the upgrade, dbus got upgraded, which restarted dbus and hal, and that caused xserver-xorg to hang. Old bug, fixed after lenny, but when upgrading *from* lenny I hit it. Ideally the upgrade process could work around this, or at least stop the upgrade and explain to upgrade some specific packages from a console, but at a minimum the release notes should explain what specific packages to upgrade first from a console. Due to this issue, I did the rest of the upgrade from a console. - Both libc6 and libpam0g prompted to restart services, causing them to get restarted twice in the same upgrade. - Restarting gdm (each time) switches to the gdm terminal, so I had to switch *back* to the console to finish the upgrade. - I got asked about migrating to dependency-based init. This question ought to have a lower priority, if it gets asked at all; it has a very sensible default, particularly if all the init scripts on the system have proper dependency headers. - Saw this message during the upgrade: "gs is already removed; it is recommended to run defoma-app purge gs". Whatever needs doing, why can't the maintainer scripts handle it? And in any case, this shouldn't just appear as a message scrolling by in the mountain of text associated with an upgrade. - The laptop I helped upgrade had a Windows partition on it, with a manually-configured entry in menu.lst to boot it. Perhaps when upgrading to grub2, some relevant script could auto-detect an entry in menu.lst with "chainload" in it, and help make sure os-prober gets installed later, or at least warn the user that they need to install it. - When I manually installed os-prober later, that didn't cause update-grub to run automatically. I had to run it by hand. - The system had an increased timeout in menu.lst (since the GRUB menu sometimes took an extra few seconds to show up due to video mode changes on an external monitor, making the effective timeout only about 2 seconds). Consider automatically migrating the "timeout" setting from menu.lst into GRUB_TIMEOUT in /etc/default/grub. - The UUID migration done by the kernel packages complained that the bootloader configuration wasn't recognized and fully migrated (possibly related to GRUB -> GRUB2 migration?) - The system didn't get automatically migrated from gdm to gdm3. - When I later manually installed gdm3, I got prompted for the preferred display manager, even though the same apt run removed gdm since gdm3 conflicted with it. - udev renamed all network interfaces to new names after the upgrade, despite the MAC addresses and similar not changing. I had to manually edit persistent-net.rules to fix them back to eth0 and wlan0. - The new version of NetworkManager asked network credentials again, due to it storing the network credentials differently than the version in lenny. This required digging up the network authentication credentials again and manually re-entering them. NetworkManager should automatically migrate the old credentials. (On the bright side, the ability in the new version to mark networks as available for all users: *awesome*.) - I ended up grabbing 2.6.37 from unstable to get a better wireless driver. When I installed 2.6.37, it warned about missing firmware from firmware-iwlwifi, but the system already had the latest version of firmware-iwlwifi installed. - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
