Bill Just out of curiosity, when testing the upgrade procedure how do you select the mix of packages installed prior to the upgrade?
Steve Bill Allombert([EMAIL PROTECTED])@2005-06-09 22:53: > Hello Debian developers, > > [Please store this mail in a safe place and read it when you have > recovered from the release party.] > > During the few weeks before sarge release, I have tried to reproduce the > upgrade problems reported to upgrade-reports [1]. I reached the following > conclusions: > > 1) Circular dependencies are cause of lot of breakage. Worse, the > problem that plague the woody to sarge upgrade are not circular > dependency in sarge but in woody. It means that if we want a nice etch > to etch+1 transition, we need to try to get rid of them now. > Usually it can be achieved by spliting packages to isolate the > dependency. > > 2) apt and aptitude reliance on C++ make them quite painful to upgrade > before doing the dist-upgrade due to C++ ABI changes. This issue is > likely to be the same during the sarge to etch upgrade, so we should not > rely on the user installing the latest apt or aptitude version before > upgrading. > > 3) There are far too many packages that mess with conffiles causing > useless dpkg conffiles handling. We should strive to do better in etch. > Never move a conffile in a maintainer script without checking the md5sum > against the stable version of the conffile. If it match, remove it > instead instead of moving it. It is the same if you use ucf instead. > > 4) Upgrade-test need to be done continuously because there is not enough > time during the freeze to fix all the problems. Another conclusion is > that this need to be done automatically. This could be done roughly > the same way as a buildd work, but would generate a 'upgrade > certificate' instead of a package. Such test will also find the > packages that cannot be installed due to maintainers scripts breakage. > > Unfortunately I do not have access to suitable hardware anymore to do > such upgrade test, so help with this project would be more than > welcome. Some kind of virtualisation technology like user-mode-linux > might be required (that is what I was using). > > As a conclusion, I am not very happy with the state of woody to sarge > upgrade. I expect around 30% of users will suffer serious breakage that > could have been avoided. This statistic assume smart users. We should do > better for etch. > > Acknowledgement: > I would like to thanks Frans Pop and Steve Langasek for bearing with me > while I was inflating the release notes changes and the RC bugs count and > for generally be helpful at trying to solve upgrade issue. > > I would also like to thanks people that took the trouble to send > upgrade-reports. > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
