A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Derek Broughton]

Colin Watson wrote:

> 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.

I'm not sure how you got from B to C, since I didn't say anything about
using apt-get only for third-party software.  I, in fact, said "perhaps it
uses apt-get", which suggests that apt-get is not the issue.  Third-party
software, however, clearly _is_ an issue because the supported upgrade path
begins a release upgrade by removing all sources for third-party software
(and annoyingly, ime, not adding them back in afterwards - really not that
difficult since you only commented them out in the first place; yes they
may well no longer point to a useful source, as many 3rd party repositories
mirror the Ubuntu release structure, but I think they should at least be
restored to the point they were at before the upgrade).  

> In almost all cases, upgrade problems that manifest using apt-get are
> entirely fixable with correct packaging. 

Absolutely!  And I've always filed bug reports for things like that against
the package.  In fact, I've rarely (perhaps never) met any kind of problem
with apt-get/aptitude that didn't stem from a packaging error (most
typically, in postrm scripts that should realize they're not really fatal
especially when you're doing an install of a newer version).
-- 
derek