On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 03:05:56PM -0500, Greg Stark wrote: > > I finally convinced a sysadmin friend of mine that Debian was the way and the > light. He started a new job and showed up on his first day to set up his > machine by installing Debian. In short, things went horribly wrong and he > started this new job by wasting two days picking up the pieces. He's now very > leery of suggesting using Debian on other machines at work or of using it > himself at home. > > What started the chain of events was that a fairly routine minor bug bit the > latest libc6 release. He's an experienced sysadmin though and wasn't the least > bit fazed by that. What drove him batty was that it was so hard to recover > from the mess and all the obvious avenues just made the problem worse. > > All he had to do was install an older version of libc6 and every other package > would have been happy. All the infrastructure is there to do this, the old > packages are all on the ftp/http sites, the package may even be sitting in > apt's cache. But there's no interface for it. > > The only interface for rolling back is switching the entire machine to an > earlier distribution and telling apt to try to downgrade -- which is unlikely > to work. And worse, every time you run apt it only downloads and unpacks > *more* packages, all of which, of course, fail as well. > > What would be really neat would be if aptitude or perhaps even apt checked for > earlier versions of the package in the pool and offered them as options if the > current one fails to configure.
<insert usual rant about new users that start with unstable deserving what they get> No, really. This is what stable and testing releases are for. -- Daniel Jacobowitz MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer