> On 29 Dec 2024, at 20:20, Enrico Zini <enr...@enricozini.org> wrote:
>
> Hello,
Hi,
>
> today I decided to upgrade from bookworm to trixie/testing[1][2]. I ran
> the upgrade in a gnome-terminal, and of course all gnome terminals in
> the system crashed halfway through the upgrade[1][3].
This is strange. I’m not a GNOME user myself, but in the KDE land, Konsole (or
any other app) never crashed during between similar large dist-upgrades.
>
> Unexpectedly, apt and dpkg kept doing their thing in their own headless
> wonderland. I tried to track progress via top and pstree, killed a
> couple of whiptail processes[4], and eventually decided to kill apt and
> restart things from a new terminal.
>
> I'm not sure how to start reporting bugs here. gnome-terminal should
> clearly not have crashed (and I do not know why it did, and I'm not sure
> I want to go through all the trouble to setup a bullworm[2] VM with
> gnome and upgrade it to trixie to see if it crashed again.
From my perspective, the GNOME terminal shouldn’t behave like that. Probably
recreating the crash and debugging it, and solving is eventually is the key.
apt did what it was designed to do, and did it well, apparently.
>
> At the same time, it was surprising that apt and dpkg continued unfazed
> after the terminal died. That may be easier to reproduce: start doing
> something with apt and kill gnome-terminal. I still need a bookseye[2]
> VM with gnome to try that out, and I have an annoying cold, so it's not
> something I'd embark on right this afternoon[5].
apt has some superpowers which allows it to continue when the terminal it has
been reporting to disappears. This allows safe upgrades over flaky SSH
sessions. The best practice is to run a terminal multiplexer before these long
and big operations, but apt is more resilient than it looks.
>
> Not sure there's much more to be done here, given the complexity of the
> whole stack, and especially if this affected just me just this once. If
> it doesn't, this mail can act a friendly "hey, it wasn't just you" for a
> fellow traveler.
>
> Trixie otherwise just works, and thank us all for it! <3
>
Trixie is already in a pretty good shape from my experience, yes, and thanks
everyone for it, too.
Have a nice year,
Hakan
>
> Enrico
>
> [1] One reason was to see if gnome is less infuriating[3]
> [2] One reason was to finally get out of release names starting with
> 'b', which have been confusing the hell out of me for half of a
> decade
> [3] Spoiler warning: not particularly
> [4] Likely warnings that this or that go or rust program or qt chromium
> embedding monster cannot be supported by the Security Team, for
> which I have heartfelt support and which however stopped the
> upgrade flow at least 5 times
> [5] Do we have a thing that clones the running system into a throwaway
> VM?
> --
> GPG key: 4096R/634F4BD1E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enr...@enricozini.org>
