Out of curiosity, what does do-release-upgrade do that editing your
sources.list, sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade wouldn't do?
-Original Message-
From: ubuntu-devel-discuss-boun...@lists.ubuntu.com [mailto:ubuntu-
devel-discuss-boun...@lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Joao Pinto
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 12:02 PM
To: Davyd McColl
Cc: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Re: upgrade from 9.04 - 9.10: the most broken Ubuntu / Debian
upgradeI have ever experienced
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 2:37 PM, Davyd McColl dav...@gmail.com wrote:
Good day all
I'll try keep it short, because this mail doesn't contain anything
particularly constructive -- it's just pertinent here because of the
sheer
number of people who have posted that perhaps Karmic wasn't ready for
the
big time. Also, I don't know where else to put this up for general
perusal
where the people who count (Ubuntu devs) will actually see it. I
could LJ
it, but you'd have to be a sad puppy to be reading my LJ
(http://fluffynuts.livejournal.com). So here it goes:
In approximately 10 years of Debian/Ubuntu usage (I switched to
Ubuntu in
the Warty days), I have *never* had the displeasure of such a broken
upgrade
process as I've just had, moving from 9.04 to 9.10. I've experienced
such
brokenness from Fedora (but hey, that *is* the testing-ground for RH,
so you
take your chances to start with, imo). Here's a short list of some
glaringly
obvious problems that even the most incompetant QA should have picked
up
(which, by the way, are being experienced by not only myself with the
heaps
of packages I have installed from the Ubuntu repos, but also by a
colleague
at work who started with a fairly standard 9.04 install just the
other
day.Please bear in mind that I have *very little* installed from
anywhere
other than archive.ubuntu.com -- I think I have 2 ppa's for tor and
rvm. So
my machine, whilst bloated with GNOME, KDE and XFCE components, is
using
mostly off-the-shelf components):
1) libc6 upgrade requires the restart of gdm. Which in turn requires
the
termination of the X11 server. Which, in turn, requires that the
upgrade
process proceeds in a never-ending loop as the actual installation of
libc6
doesn't complete properly. Not a problem for a vet with some
experience -- a
big problem for the average joe that Ubuntu is normally so well-
suited
for. Whilst I can switch to a VT and use apt, I don't have the
confidence
that the average user out there could, although they would have been
presented with the same upgrade now? question by update-manager
2) When I finally got the process started, there were several (read
10+)
rounds of the following:
apt-get dist-upgrade
[apt breaks because of package dependencies or other issues, such
as the
config script for a package failing]
apt-get install -f
[lather, rinse, repeat]
again, not that great for Joe user. Not that great for me either. But
at
least I can attempt to fix it and remove conflicting and horribly
broken
packages. I have several bug reports on Launchpad. I got tired of
posting
them all when I got to about the 10th one. Generally, the issues were
often
of the format:
upgrade of package [Y] requires installation of new package [Y-
funkyname],
but old [Y] wasn't removed first, so the installation of [Y-
funkyname] fails
because of a package file conflict. Indi comes to mind here.
OR
bad installation scripts which cannot be run more than once (say,
when the
package fails to install the first time). Wicd shines here, trying to
add my
user to the net-dev group repeatedly and failing because I'm
already in
that group from the first time it partially installed.
3) The kicker: after spending a couple of hours on this, I managed to
get my
machine to a state where apt claimed that I had no more updates
available.
So I figured it was time for the inevitable reboot. Except... GRUB is
broken. Can't boot. Showstopper. I've tried fixing with a 64-bit
Debian DVD
(sorry, I didn't have the 9.10 install CD down yet -- it was coming
down for
me to share with friends when all hell broke loose during my
upgrade).
When trying to fix from with a chrooted shell on the problematic
system,
grub-install consistently fails with an error that it has an error
reading
the stage1 file (which exists and I've seen it unpacked from a re-
install of
the package .deb using dpkg in a chrooted shell, so please, don't
tell me
that I personally have a problem with the file -- I would be
surprised if
this isn't happening a lot more (and may well be because of changes
from the
old GRUB to GRUB2 -- but again, a simple QA process *should* have
caught
this).
To add insult to injury, for the very first time in my life, I'm
using my
dual-booted Windows install to provide a platform
