On 2025-03-06 08:43 +0000, Holger Levsen wrote: > On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 08:39:43PM -0500, Helmut K. C. Tessarek wrote: > > Both network "outages" could have been prevented by adding a note at the end > > of the dist-upgrade output. > > they could also have been prevented by reading the release notes and following > their advice.
Would it? Do we know why these things happened? K.C. does not say what he was upgrading from/to (so it wasn't a very useful report in that regard), but there has certainly been a long-term expectation that headless upgrades will work (and in my experience of 25 years now they always do (well done everyone - I am regularly impressed at how this usually doesn't break). Which entry in which release notes will warn that this time (presumably - was this an upgrade to unstable K.C. or to bookworm, or something else?) the (pretty old now) eth0 -> 'annoying, unmemorable, but ordered and unique', renaming will/might actually break your config? Or that dhcpd will be replaced by network manager in such a way that things break? (Is the mechanism here that the server was running dhcpd to dish out addresses so now in fact the server is working but other machines are not getting addresses? I do read the release notes before the first upgrade to a new release, but I wouldn't be expecting either of the mentioned things to break so I'm not (yet) convinced that 'RTFM' is a fair response here. I do vaguely recall that one version of DHCP (isc-dhcp?) was being retired (did that happen for bookworm?). But normally debian upgrades do not replace your existing packages, precisely because they might be doing something important. I've just looked over the release notes for upgrading to bookworm and whilst here is loads of good advice about checking for obsolete packages, noting removals, making backups etc, it is largely generic and relies on the user knowing what removed packages do. I didn't see anything specific which warned about the 2 issues noted, and the guide is pretty long these days, so some skimming the 3rd time you upgrade is inevitable. So yeah, would RTFM really have avoided these problems? Maybe, maybe not. In general I would echo Helmut's response: it is better to work out why this happenned and try to prevent it, than to add more notices, as we do have some notice mechanisms already. But they are old, and expectations change so it's not crazy to ask if they are still sufficient. But equally, starting with 'it's your fault' seems unhelpful and possibly unfair. I look forward to some answers in response to Helmut, and we'll find out if there are real issues to address or not. Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware http://wookware.org/
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