A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Liam Proven]

2009/3/8 Mario Vukelic <mario.vukelic at dantian.org>:
> On Sun, 2009-03-08 at 16:07 +0000, David Gerard wrote:
>> Providing a mechanism in the interface ("would you like to upgrade?")
>> and then noting in the fine print "this doesn't actually work."
>
> As has been noted by Toby, there is a confusion of terms. What is not
> supported (though can be made to work by someone well-versed in the APT
> tools) is "dist-upgrade", as in "apt-get dist-upgrade".
>
> The supported upgrade path is through Update Manager in the GUI or
> do-release-upgrade on the command line (primarily for Ubuntu Server),
> and this should indeed work -- failures with these tools are indeed
> bugs. However, the name of this is not "dist-upgrade" for obvious danger
> of confusion with the older "apt-get dist-upgrade".

Thanks for the clarification.

Perhaps I should clarify, too.

Although since an apt-get dist-upgrade went awry on me, I have not
tried it again, when I commented that dist-upgrade was unsupported, I
was directly replying to Dave Gerard's comment that he'd known it go
wrong. I know David personally in real life, as it happens, and he
certainly knows Unix - probably better than I do, in fact. So when he
referred to dist-upgrade & compared its failure to its success on
Debian, I took it to mean that he spoke of the "apt-get dist-upgrade"
command itself.

But, more generally, when I said that I'd seen upgrades go wrong on me
several times, I was talking about using the proper "update manager"
tool from the GUI. It seems to surprise people on the lists, but this
goes wrong too.

Now, it should be said, I normally tweak Ubuntu installs a bit. I
would consider it a bare minimum, in order to get a useful system, to
install the restricted-extras package, install Win32codecs,
libdvddecss or whatever it's called, make sure the MS webfonts were
installed, load up a few things like Thunderbird and Skype, maybe the
Acrobat reader and GoogleEarth, possibly remove redundant programs
like Evolution and so on.

For novice users, I'd also consolidate the 2 panels into a single,
Windows-like one, remove the multiple-desktops icon and junk like
that, add in quicklaunch icons for all their main apps, lock
everything in place, put shortcuts to Documents, Pictures etc. on the
desktop, stuff like that. Make it all look a bit more Windows-like.

What I find is that once you've added some custom programs from the
repos, added in a few apps from source or .DEBs or something, removed
some stuff you don't use, replaced a few standard apps with
replacements, maybe installed an unsupported upgrade (e.g. OpenOffice
3 on 8.10 and 8.04), things like that - then there is a very good
chance that the standard version-upgrade, however you do it, will
leave you with missing icons, broken icons, menu entries duplicated or
non-working, missing file associations, all sorts of crap like that.

So, personally, I file everything away in a separate /home filesystem
and install a new clean / filesystem with everything in it. Then the
required tidying-up is fairly minor.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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