[Fwd: Re: Two rather negative articles about Ubuntu]

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 08:12:29AM +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> * Matt Zimmerman:
> > We support it in the same way that we always have, and as Debian always has.
> > Upgrades using apt-get dist-upgrade have always had the same problems that
> > they do now.  The only difference is that we have a better alternative which
> > doesn't have these problems, and we encourage its use.  I don't see where
> > the rumour has come from that it works any less than it used to.
> 
> That may be my mistake then.
> 
> The impression I had been getting was that in the past, whenever an
> upgrade broke on a system that didn't have ubuntu-desktop installed, the
> developers would say "that's a bug, we should be supporting upgrade
> paths without relying on metapackages", and that now, lots of people
> have been reporting these problems with Dapper, and the answer is "you
> didn't follow the release notes and use update-manager, you've brought
> it on yourself".

We have no mechanism other than dependencies for installing new packages on
upgrade, and sometimes this is needed for proper functionality.
Metapackages are the method we have always used to install new top-level
applications and infrastructure for the desktop, and the package description
has always reflected this.

I've made the language somewhat scarier in Edgy.

> From what you've said the actual position is "it is a bug, but you could
> work around it by using the more sophisticated upgrade tool".

It depends on what "it" is.  The fact that "apt-get dist-upgrade" doesn't
install a new package, foo, which is needed in Dapper but not in Breezy, is
not a bug.  That isn't what apt-get dist-upgrade does, and we can't change
its behaviour since it is used for other situations as well.  This is the
root of the problem, using the same techniques both for incremental upgrades
and for upgrades across releases.

-- 
 - mdz