On Sun, 2020-12-27 at 06:01 +0000, M. Zhou wrote: > Hi folks, > > I don't quite understand the meaning of automatic upgrades on a > rolling > system such as Debian/Sid. According to my own experience, such > automatic upgrades could be dangerous. > > Recently package ppp is pending for upgrade but it does not co-exist > with my currently installed network-manager. Today when I was > shutting > down my machine, Gnome automatically checked the "install updates > ..." > box for me before I realized its existence. As a result, the system > reboots and installed ppp by force, removing network-manager and > break > my system for daily use as I need network-manager for wifi-access. > > I've been a daily Sid user for at least 4 years. Automatic upgrades > are > to blame for nearly all my system troubles. And I feel very > disappointed every time linux behaves like M$ windows. > > So, do we have a consensus on whether automatic upgrades should be > enabled by default? >
This has not happened simply due to automatic upgrades, it has happened because your system, automatically or otherwise, performed a dist- upgrade/full-upgrade rather than a "normal"/"simple"/"basic" upgrade, and so rather than holding back the ppp upgrade in the face of the conflict, it proceeded with the conflict-resolution solution of removing network-manager in order to upgrade ppp. You would not have encountered the problem with just a "normal" upgrade. This conflict arose of course due to the new ppp package being marked as compatible only with a new network-manager version, and it being published on unstable a day or so before the new and compatible network-manager package was, which unfortunately is a type of situation that occurs from time to time on sid, sometimes taking several days to get sorted out. Allowing your system to automatically perform a full/dist upgrade on sid is a very unwise thing to do precisely because problems like this are to be expected. (Apt/aptitude does not understand that the conflict is just temporary, requiring a few days of patience waiting for further updates to become available for other packages, and thus full/dist upgrading suggests removing stuff to fix conflicts). I use sid/unstable myself. I have unattended-upgrades installed though I typically manually install upgrades anyway. When I performed a "normal" upgrade the other day, the ppp package upgrade was correctly blocked (held back), and only became unblocked once the compatible updated network-manager package became available a day or so later. Having noticed something was blocked though, since occasionally manual action is required to fix an actual problem, I asked aptitude/apt-get to try a full-upgrade such that I could see what was held back; this showed me the conflict, and I wisely chose not to proceed with the proposed solution of removing network-manager, understanding the situation for what it was from past experience. I thus did not have the unfortunate experience of loosing network-manager like you did. You need to investigate why your system is running a dist/full upgrade rather than a normal one and configure it not to do so. You will thus have a better experience. You might also have a better experience on 'testing' rather than sid, however the problem with using 'testing' is that security upgrades can sometimes be significantly delayed, which is why I personally avoid it. Paul Wise mentioned a solution to this in his response which is interesting, though I'm not certain I'm confident enough in its reliability to make use of it myself. Some people responding to this thread do not seem to understand that sid/unstable is **not** an actual "rolling" distro. I would love Debian to properly and officially offer an actual "rolling" distro alongside the stable one, since many like myself use unstable as though it was and love/trust Debian too much to move to something else, however unstable/sid along with testing and experimental are all simply different "staging" areas for the preparation of the next (major) stable Debian release. Unstable & testing not being an actual "rolling" distros means that we cannot expect to have quite the same expectations as for an actual "rolling" distro.
