feh

[ewx]

Upgraded my PC to Debian testing last night. Apt needed its usual huge amounts of hand-holding, and by the time I went to bed it wouldn't boot any more. It seems to be mostly OK now though; a few programs seem to have evaporated and Gnome has trashed its old (per-user) configuration and not bothered to install a new one.

Comments

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

Why did apt need handholding? I've not had a problem with it, so far. Debian do seem to be reworking gnome, I've noticed a lot of packages have disappeared from the apt archives.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Some things it did this time were: told me that a bunch of packages have been "held back" without saying why; failed to upgrade some things, usually instead removing them completely (for instance gnome-panel, explaining perhaps why Gnome was so thoroughly broken, though I didn't have much time to investigate properly this morning); installed things bit by bit and complain when they error when feeding the lot to dpkg in a single "dpkg -iGEB *.deb" command actually worked much better.

[imc.livejournal.com]

. . . and I thought rpm needed handholding.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The silly thing is, apart from for installing a small number of packages, I find that apt actually needs more handholding than nearly-raw dpkg.

[pm215]

> installed things bit by bit and complain when they error

Sounds like bug 172339, at least alleviated in apt 0.5.5. You did upgrade apt first, right?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I didn't, no.

[pm215]

Ah. "upgrade the package management bits first" has been standard upgrade advice since the year dot... (Not that the upgrade is as seamless as I'd like, but that does usually help.)

[cjwatson]

If the distribution grows much further it'll be an absolute necessity; apt in stable had retarded cache limits that rendered it difficult to actually use non-trivial numbers of Packages files.

I never use apt-get dist-upgrade to go from distribution to distribution; dselect works much better. If you must use apt-get paying close attention to what it's going to remove is essential, just in case.

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

Thoroughly agree; even then, I find I still need to watch dselect+apt like a hawk. The other day I was trying to clean up the sprawling mass of perl binaries on my system, and it tried to remove libc6 on me...