On Sat, Jan 03, 2015 at 08:01:36PM -0500, Cindy-Sue Causey wrote: > On 1/3/15, Siard <shiems...@kpnplanet.nl> wrote: > > > > I can confirm that I have been able to fix these very problems using > > aptitude. It was an install of jessie that had not been updated for > > a month or two giving these errors, whereas another install of jessie > > that had been updated regularly, did not have such problems. > > > The successful, regularly updated one as being in incremental steps > versus the not so regularly updated one with glitches being one facing > a larger "step" sure stands out. I've seen the same mentioned about > different offshoots of Debian.. Recommendations are to do baby steps > in upgrades there.. >
Example: Jessie's frozen not long back. There will be fewer changes but packages are gradually updated to fix bugs / packages are removed for releasse critical bugs. [Made up numbers follow] Suppose there are 1000 fixes overall in about three months. You have a choice of doing: 100 tiny upgrades, each fixing 10 bugs at a time. One upgrade a week - fixing about 96 bugs a time One upgrade a month - fixing about 330 bugs a time One upgrade in the three month period at the end - fixing all 1000 bugs. There is always the chance that you'll miss a package change which may break soemthing else the longer you leave it. if the marginal cost to you of doing the upgrades is small - you've got three or four minutes to spend while your machine checks updates and installs each time - Are you better to spend 400 - 500 minutes - 6 1/2 - 8 1/3 hours - doing 100 tiny update checks each of which is likely to succeed? Twelve upgrades - each taking half an hour to an hour in total because it may take longer to download packages - 6 - 12 hours? Four upgrades - each of which will take anything up to a couple of hours by the time they've downloaded the packages / unpacked and installed them - 8 hours - 16 hours? One upgrade, which may go well - set aside a couple of hours - or might take significantly longer and may cause problems you may have to sort out? > People report issues regularly if they try to skip a couple major > upgrades in between what they're using and whatever is just released. > In that same realm, I've also seen it regularly advocated that users > take the time and use the necessary additional resources to go through > every other major missed release point before landing at the last, > latest one.. > > I've pondered out loud about it before somewhere.. It's obvious > something regularly doesn't cog together well somehow, but I wonder > what. What is it that works about incremental that so regularly > doesn't if someone for any reason misses a couple seemingly minuscule > upgrade points in between? I wonder how we users can nail down what's > going on to help make it occur less so forever after.. > > *cough-cough* #Usability *cough-cough* :) > > It's good to know that Aptitude helped. It would be interesting to > hear what Aptitude *does* do under the hood when users tell it to try > again.. Each, our favorite package managers... they're what make > Debian rock and roll.......... > > Cindy :) > > -- > Cindy-Sue Causey > Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA > > * runs with plastic sporks * > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org > Archive: > https://lists.debian.org/CAO1P-kDd1OEnEjm3m0iZp3v=lrrvte2vobq-hdt-ftcbzt2...@mail.gmail.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150104123826.ga2...@galactic.demon.co.uk