Ubuntu Upgrade-Experience

[Ben Bucksch]

  Here's an high-level user-experience view of the Upgrade/Update

In this case, this was an unimportant, uninteresting server that I'm 
keeping mainly to host emails addresses for my friends, and similar 
stuff. Just mail + web, fairly standard config. I have about 10 servers, 
and use Linux since 10 years, and am a open source software developer, 
but server admin is not my job, I just run them myself for privacy 
reasons (my data on my machines) and to help my friends. In other words, 
I'm qualified, but no admin specialist, and this was a completely 
mundane standard job.

It installed the server a good year ago, so it was hardy. Now, I decided 
to update it. I took 3 hours (!). Of that time, download of packages 
were about 30 seconds.

Main reasons were:


    Config file mess

Ideal: From a high-level perspective, /etc/ is config files, and it 
should contain only things that *I* specified, either manually with a 
text editor or via setup-tools. It should not contain distro-defaults. 
Given that Unix apps want them in /etc/, distro-defaults and user 
settings should at least be in separate dirs.
Current situation: my.cnf and apache.conf contain both lots of 
distro-defaults, which are presumably needed for good operation, and my 
own changes, e.g. to specify a different error log file location, site 
config file locations and similar. This *must* lead to conflicts.
Proposal: Make one config file for distro defaults, and one or more for 
user changes, and the latter is empty by default (and it works well), 
unless I change settings, which I then do there.
This requires that it's easy to override settings, both ways, and that 
there are several config files, ordered. If the app doesn't support 
that, add it.
Goal: should be that the "config directory" of the system, when freshly 
installed, contains only hostname, location and timezone of user and the 
account/password of the user, and similar things I specify during 
installation, or that I change later, possibly manually or via setup 
tools. This would solve all config file conflicts during update, because 
my my.cnf would contain only "datadir = /foo; enable-networking", and 
that would overlay nicely with the distro-defaults.

Note how Mozilla does that: prefs have a default (which can be in 
several files, which are ordered, so you can have platform prefs, app 
prefs and distro prefs), and a user value. User values are stored in a 
different file and thus never ever conflict with app default config 
changes. If a pref format changes (which we try to avoid, but is 
sometimes necessary), we migrate user prefs explicitly to the new form.


    apt-get upgrade asking questions

I know this is an old Debian topic, but it's *still* asking questions 
in-between, and blocking upgrade-progress on them, which requires me to 
constantly watch the upgrade-process, which took a long time. Most of 
the questions were either

    * "Should I restart postfix?" (YEEEESSSSS! *duh* - Actually, I don't
      care, I'll reboot the machine at the end anyways, to use the new
      kernel)
    * The config file conflicts mentioned above
    * A few other ones.

For the "few other ones", find one way to ask all that at the very 
beginning, or at least at the very end, never in the middle and blocking 
on it.
It's totally unnerving that I have to read one sentence, press enter, 
and then wait for a few minutes, repeat. I can't do any other 
thought-requiring task at the same time.


    do-release-upgrade doesn't offer upgrade

do-release-upgrade didn't work, it claimed there are no new releases, 
which is clearly wrong. do-release-upgrade --devel-release did 
something, but doesn't tell me what it would upgrade to. I realize that 
there are LTS branches, normal releases, and beta versions, but 
do-release-upgrade doesn't seem to realize that. If I call it, it should 
at least say:
"
You are currently running Ubuntu hardy 8.04.
This is a LTS (long term support) release. It is still supported with 
security updates until April 2011 by current plans.
You may choose to upgrade it to a newer release, if you want.
The following newer LTS releases are available: none
The following normal releases are available: karmic (9.10)
The following beta releases are available: sid (10.04)
If you want to upgrade to one of them, call
do-release-upgrade --to <name>
"

Note that fixing do-release-upgrade won't solve any of 1. or 2.. apt-get 
dist-upgrade should still work without constant attention and manual 
fixing, and do-release-upgrade shouldn't cause config file conflicts either.

So, in sum, it took 3 hours just to update an unimportant, uninteresting 
server, in a virtual machine even, with not much stuff on it (mail + 
apache) and hardly any changes to the default configs. That needs to 
improve considerably, I don't have time to spend 3 hours per server per 
year just to change its pampers. Note that my server all have different 
tasks and all are thus slightly different in release and software.

Ben

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