Edgy in the news

[Eric Dunbar]

On 29/10/06, Daniel Robitaille <robitaille at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Oct 2006, baza wrote:
> > I did have to dist-upgrade twice, and apt-get xserver-xorg by hand, but
> > other than that it was painless, and as far as I know I've got all the
> > packages and apps I should have.
>
> just re-read what you just wrote, and that's probably the essence of the
> problems for a lot of these cases seen in these blogs and form postings.
> Me, you, and probably most the users on this list have the knowledge to
> do these steps to repair that failed upgrade.
>
> Most users probably don't even know what "apt-get" is, some have
> possibly heard of that magical spell "apt-get dist-upgrade" and are
> trying it after being told by someone that this is the way to upgrade,
> and the majority have never heard of that mysterious "xserver-xorg"
> thing.
>
> They run the dist-upgrade once, run into very obscure errors (for their
> knowledge level), and then stop and complain that the upgrade has broke
> their system.

The official instructions also tell you to dist-upgrade twice ;-).

FYI I did the "update-manager -c" and it worked beautifully.

As for the person who commented on Automatix and warnings (in a
separate post)...

>>   - Implementation of common-customizations spec and more aggressive
>> warnings about using Automatix and its ilk would help prevent this
>> occurring in the first place

>I'd rather not have Ubuntu *force* any user to do anything, especially
>something that requires X.
>
>Warnings about Automatix would probably offend quite a few people.

If they're getting offended they need to get the proverbial life.

If a piece of software is designed to bypass officially supported
upgrade paths then said individuals have no place complaining that
this unofficial route doesn't work or that they shouldn't be warned
that this route likely will be incompatible with the formally
supported route. If these individuals would like to be able to use
Automatix, make a donation of however much cash will be required to
pay devs to work on supporting said software. "Put your money where
your mouth is." or "Put up or shut up."