online article: "Dapper Drake verdict: It sucks"

[Daniel Robitaille]

On 6/13/06, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 08:28:19AM -0700, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> > a negative review of Dapper in tectonic.com:
> >
> > http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1026
> >
> > Reading between the lines  it seems one of their problem was a missing
> > ubuntu-desktop before attempting the Breezy==>Dapper dist upgrade
> > which led to a whole list of missing applications after the upgrade
> > (including OOo)
>
> Interestingly enough, since it is known that ubuntu-desktop can be
> inadvertently uninstalled, the upgrade tool actually uses some logic to
> notice that it is missing and put it back.
>
> So it would appear that he did the upgrade by hand rather than following the
> instructions, without paying close attention to what was happening.

It's actually the more experienced users who probably get caught with
that problem: "I don't need to read the instructions...I'll change my
sources.list, dist-upgrade and be done with the upgrade doing what I
have always done in Debian/Ubuntu!" :)

It a somewhat similar problem, I recently I got caught trying to
install both flashplugin-nonfree and sun-java5 using apt-get, and it
didn't work in both case since I was using the command line.  Doing it
from synaptic them worked perfectly.

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/44568
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/sun-java5/+bug/44891

This was caused by the extra "gui stuff" needed for the installation
to work correctly that didn't work using a default apt-get in a normal
user environment.  (the Sun license to agree for java;  asking to
download extra stuff from macromedia for flash)

Between these 2 packages installation I had to redo with synaptic, and
the correct upgrade from Breezy to Dapper that appears works better
using the upgrade-manager command instead of apt-get dist-upgrade, I
just wonder if Ubuntu has been slowly going on a path away from
command line and into a more gui-rich environment  that result in
users more familiar to the command-line to have to  adjust slightly
their behaviour and the way they do normal system-admin things.  I'm
not saying that this is good or bad, but it is different than before.


-- 
Daniel Robitaille