Edgy in the news

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 06:30:29AM +1100, Peter Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:51:23 -0800
> Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 
> > > Umm - dist-upgrade is still a useful tool in certain contexts, especially
> > > coupled with aptitude. Simply insisting on the update-manager strikes me as
> > > rather unworkable anyway. Or is there a work-around for people whose X is
> > > broken, or who are upgrading from a system without X or gnome etc ?
> > 
> > It's useful for incremental upgrades, but using it for a complex upgrade to
> > an entirely new release of Ubuntu is problematic by design.  It has to
> > "guess" which packages to keep and which to remove, while Update Manager
> > "knows" what's appropriate for the upgrade.
> 
> If this was true in practice, I would bow to your far greater knowledge
> and expertise :-)
> 
> My experience was that the update-manager broke half way through an
> upgrade to edgy, and that running a combination of aptitude dist-upgrade
> (several repetitions in combinations that I can't now exactly recall), with
> apt-get -f install and dpkg --configure -a rescued the situation.
> 
> I did have ubuntu-desktop etc. installed, but perhaps the presence of
> xubuntu-desktop was a complicating factor, as your other post implies. I
> agree with Derek, though, that having xubuntu-desktop installed as well as
> ubuntu-desktop would be a fairly common and normal scenario.
> 
> While I'm sure the update manager is smart, it doesn't "know" quite enough
> in certain cases, ( yet ) evidently. 

The upgrade tool is solving a very complex problem, and there are surely
cases it doesn't handle yet.  These should be filed as bugs in Launchpad at
http://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+filebug .

Otherwise, you will have to continue hacking around with apt-get -f install
forever.

-- 
 - mdz