A couple of rants about Launchpad

[David Gerard]

2009/3/6 Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com>:
> On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 09:48:32AM +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:

>> You can at least ensure that certain basic configuration tools work
>> before you put them in a release. It gives a very bad image when I have
>> to walk a person through the terminal running commands to work around a
>> bug in a configuration tool for a basic need.

> As above, we do test all sorts of things including configuration tools
> and make sure they work. Obviously when something slips through for some
> subset of people the natural conclusion for them is that we didn't
> bother testing configuration tools at all, but that isn't the case. Our
> testing does have holes and we're always trying to improve it, but it is
> not absent by any means.


In my experience, dist-upgrade is more often problematic than not. I
recently tried taking a laptop through 6.06->8.04->8.10 (I could only
find a 6.06 CD on hand). LTS to LTS to current should be flawless; I
had to do command-line stuff with apt-get to get it to work smoothly.
That's just not good enough.

I recently had to disrecommend Ubuntu on servers at work because the
desktop dist-upgrade just isn't up to scratch IME, and that just
doesn't bode well enough for servers. (Instead we're using
RHEL/CentOS, which doesn't do the equivalent well at all, but *does*
have seven years of maintenance. If we were going to do it, I'd
probably go Debian plus hand-installed binaries. But RHEL/CentOS is
easier on this score.)

Debian famously manages dist-upgrades flawlessly. What are they doing
that we aren't?


- d.