Evolution & Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

[Erik Andersen]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 10:28, Patrick Goetz <pgoetz at mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
>> Subject:  Re: Evolution & Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
>> From:    Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com>
>> Date:    Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:02:32 +0100
>> To:      ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com
>>
>
>> Ubuntu has been bitten by upgrading to new versions which were rewritten
>> in the past and we have learnt, the decision has been made to stay on a
>> version which is not perfect but that we know about rather running to
>> use a rewrite in the risk of being stucked with something not ready
>> quality and feature wise for a lts.
>
>
> As someone who is now running Lucid Alpha 3 on some production servers
> because I absolutely need some features of programs that have been
> updated in the last 1.5 years and Karmic is a largely an unusable
> disaster, I can see both sides of this argument.
>
> Why not use something like ubuntu-backports more aggressively to make
> everyone happy?
>
> PPA's are great, but we've already gotten burned once by using the PPA
> for a newer version of OpenOffice and having it suddenly disappear a few
> months later, throwing the automatic updates on 300 client machines into
> disarray.
>
> Given the speed with which open source software evolves, and given the
> need/desire of users to have access to the latest and greatest, it would
> be very useful to give users access to the newest versions of such
> things as Firefox, Thunderbird, Dia, gimp, OpenOffice, and so on.
> Generally these user space programs just work without causing system
> level regressions.  And it's kind of embarrassing to recommend linux to
> a user and have them tell me they like running Windows because "it's a
> lot easier to keep Firefox/Thunderbird/etc. up to date" rather than
> waiting a year before having access to nifty new features they get
> instantaneously on their windows box the day after the package is released.
>
> Of course there's always the chance of "being bitten" as described
> above.  To this end, I've been thinking about this for a while and would
>  like to propose the following solution.  Unfortunately implementing
> this would require hacking or modifying the current .deb architecture.
> The basic idea is to make new packages available through
> ubuntu-backports (or ubuntu-unstable or ubuntu-experimental or something
> like this) but with a simple mechanism for backing out of the upgrade if
> it doesn't work out so well.  For example, suppose Ubuntu X.Y ships with
> gumptaculer version 1.7.3 and a few months later gumptaculer version 2.0
> is released with much fanfare, front page articles in Infoworld, Linux
> Journal, lwn.net, and breathless reviews across the blogosphere.  Users
> start clamoring for the features of gumptacular 2.0, not knowing how
> they ever lived without them.  So,
>
>    apt-get install gumptacular/ubuntu-experimental
>
> installs v. 2.0.  Unfortunately it turns out that whenever you run
> gumptacular 2.0 on a machine with an nVidia graphics card, the GPU fan
> spins out of control and melts the system board.  Problem.  The
> suggested new feature is a way to simply back out of the experimental
> update whenever you get bitten:
>
>    apt-revert gumptacular
>
> would un-install v. 2.0 and re-install v. 1.7.3 -- problem solved and
> users will just have to wait until version 2.0.1 is released (shortly).
>  Understood that there could be lots of complications with
> dependencies, but that's why it's called ubuntu-experimental  -- the
> onus is on the administrator to apply such changes atomically (i.e. one
> at a time) so that they can be backed out of without having to unwind a
> spaghetti mess of now inter-related dependencies created by updating
> several experimental packages at once.  If only one package was updated,
> then all the dependencies can be reverted, too without compromising the
> system.
>
>
>
>
>
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>

The apt-revert thing would sure be nice for ppa's too, because if
someone installs packages from a ppa and then removes the ppa, it
takes some searching to find all the ppa packages and revert them to
the official version.

----
Erik B. Andersen