A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 02:35:45PM -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Christopher Chan wrote:
> > Great. apt-get not supported? Now that means if I have a hundred
> > desktops to look after, I am going to have to go round to each one,
> > login and then start the upgrade process.
> 
> No, there is an "unattended upgrades" option for servers.  I haven't looked
> into it.  Perhaps it uses apt-get, but nevertheless the developers are
> saying "don't go manually handling your own upgrades, because we won't
> support it", and I agree with them.  They can't possibly come up with all
> the potential problems if you start throwing your own sources into
> sources.list, and installing all sorts of arcane software. 

Using apt-get for upgrades is entirely orthogonal to whether you use
third-party software, so I'm not quite sure how you got from A to B
here. (And, of course, unless we deal with third-party software, we will
never correctly handle upgrades in the field. The cases where upgrades
fail for real-world Ubuntu users are mostly when third-party software is
installed, and we can't ignore that.)

In almost all cases, upgrade problems that manifest using apt-get are
entirely fixable with correct packaging. There are a small number of
cases where this is not the case, and those require workarounds in
update-manager. Nevertheless, if we simply throw up our hands and say
that apt-get is not supported, then we ignore the fact that the correct
way to fix most upgrade problems will deal with apt-get as well; working
around *everything* in update-manager would lead to a significantly more
fragile system, as well as a pretty exhausted update-manager maintainer!

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]