I just ran through a woody-sarge update, and (temporarilly) lost a number of perl databases that an unpackaged app had created. Took me quite a while to figure out exactly what happened, more time than a user should normally be expected to put into debugging I think.
Woody's perl 5.6 uses libdb2. Sarge's uses libdb4. libdb4 cannot natively open databases created with libdb2, and while this point is stated in perl's changelog, I don't believe most users will read all 20 pages of changelog entries that have occured since then, and there appeared to be no notification in the process of the upgrade that such an issue would take place. There is an upgrade script available, but afaict it's only reference is buried deep in that changelog. Sounds like a perfect place to use a NEWS.gz file and apt-listchanges, if there's a way to enforce the installation of apt-listchanges. Comments?
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