Larry Garfield wrote: > Am I the only one who upgrades KDE without problems? In the 2+ years I've > been using Debian, I've taken KDE from 2.2.2 to 3.4.1, including every point > release along the way, with only one hiccup; And that was a random 3rd party > repository for KDE 3.0 under Woody that jammed on the KDEPIM package at one > point. Aside from that problem 2 years ago, KDE upgrades haven't caused me > any notable problems. Just remember to log out and back in again after > upgrading kdelibs or kicker or something along those lines and you're > fine. :-)
I don't know. But certainly in my work lab engineering environment with a lot of random users installing a lot of random kde components such that no two systems have exactly the same list of kde packages installed it never upgrades cleanly from one version to the next. This includes a stock upgrade from woody to sarge, which is really the only valid Debian operation. It also includes moving from various sarge testing release snapshots to other sarge testing release snapshots. I think the problem is that the web of dependencies in the kde packages has been very complex. I don't know if this is now better in the released sarge. But during the testing phase APT (either apt-get or aptitude) would find a different local minima than the one I want. The problems are almost always one of two types. APT wants to remove a large number of packages that I want installed. Those are actually fairly easy. Let it remove those packages and just install them again later. But you have to keep track so you know what was installed so that you can install them again. But the harder problem is when a package fails to install and leaves things 'i'nstalled but 'U'nconfigured. Running install -f and such I have often seen things from the sarge testing releases get into a state where they will fail repeatedly. At that point apt can't make progress forward to install and can't make progress back to remove. I get out of that state by reaching down to dpkg and removing the package explicitly. That usually needs '--force-depends', which I hate using but has been the only way to break the cycle. Then getting everything off the system and reinstalling has been the only solution in many cases for the machines I have dealt with. Of course after a KDE upgrade any running KDE programs get confused. So I always do KDE ugprades from the text console without KDE running. But never at any time has a reboot been needed. :-) Bob
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