Edgy in the news

[Peter Garrett]

On Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:51:35 +0000
Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> * Daniel Robitaille:
> > The negative stories and blogs about Edgy are
> > starting to pile up:
> 
> As with the last release cycle, people *expect* "apt-get dist-upgrade"
> to work, and are losing their systems when they try. The negative
> implications of not supporting upgrades via apt-get are starting to hit
> Ubuntu really hard in terms of reputation.

I think there are several issues here:

* People who expect Ubuntu to behave like Debian ( but who are not
necessarily aware that even Debian now recommends aptitude over apt-get
for dist-upgrades )

* People who have put their faith in 3rd party solutions to automatically
install various bits and pieces, without understanding the possible
consequences. I will not mention the most obvious candidate ... ;-)

* People who blame Ubuntu when something outside Ubuntu breaks on upgrade 
( Skype, proprietary drivers etc. )

* The update manager isn't quite "there" yet. On one dapper > edgy upgrade
attempt here, it broke half way through, and I had to use a combination of
apt-get -f install  and aptitude dist-upgrade, repeated several times, to
complete the upgrade. Unfortunately, although a dialogue asking me to
report the failure *did* pop up, it required a separate step to find and
append /var/crash/core  or whatever the file is named, which is hardly the
kind of thing most users are going to do, especially in the middle of a
dist-upgrade. I confess I didn't do it myself - I was kind of
concentrating on how to *fix the problem*, rather than feeling
community-minded, at the time ;-) Not to mention that I wasn't sure that
networking was working properly ...

I suspect that using aptitude rather than apt-get would solve at least
some of these issues, if running the upgrade from CLI/terminal emulator. In
the case of dapper > edgy there was also the issue of being aware that
"upstart" needed to be installed. In short, the only people who would know
how to complete a failed upgrade would be those who are pretty up to date
with the latest inclusions for edgy, or sufficiently careful about looking
up instructions and knowing roughly where to look for them. Having some
experience with apt and the OS in general also helps in these rather
scary moments. Of course, if something pops up saying for example, "you
need to run dpkg --configure -a " , a lot of "human beings" are going to
have a small fit. Not a good situation for most users.

Peter